 And put them up on the screen, yeah. And then, oh, let me see what's going on. So, I'm hoping you'll follow me. Yeah. You see how I'm saying it. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. Could I ask people to come take their seats? Well good morning everybody, and thank you for a very early start and for coming all from across the country to be here. I'm Jeff Sachs and could not be more thrilled to have all of us together for the launch of the Sustainable Development Solutions Network for the US. And thank you for all being founding members. I think we're here for very important and exciting times together and activities that I hope and trust will strengthen your activities, your universities, and collectively the United States and the world. And I can't tell you how pleased I am that when the invitations went out to all of you, the responses from all over the country were prompt and enthusiastic, an overwhelming agreement that we should get together and we should work together to help move the United States and the world towards sustainable development. And it was extremely exciting and gratifying for all of us to see this flood of positive and enthusiastic and warm and encouraging responses come in from all over the country. We have universities that as of our count last evening have combined enrollment of 1.7 million students represented in the room. That's a pretty good start. We really represent a lot of higher education in the United States. There are many other schools that want to join and will be joining the network. Today we're getting oriented, getting to know each other. So please mingle, say hello, introduce yourselves. It's the start of a great collaboration together. And also a bit of an orientation around the sustainable development goals for some of you at least and for the SDSN more generally, which will try to explain its purpose and organization over the next few hours. We'll be joined by two wonderful congresswomen this afternoon who will talk a bit about the Washington scene and the importance of sustainable development in that context in our session on politics and outreach at 2.30 this afternoon. I'm thrilled that joining me in helping to launch this activity are Dan Estee of Yale and Gordon McCord of UC San Diego. The three of us will be the co-chairs of this process going forward. And we are going to be completely eager to be in regular contact with you and discussing and brainstorming how to be highly effective and how to be supporting you in these activities. I wanted to start this morning just with a quick discussion of the sustainable development goals because they bring us together. And they are the purpose of the network. And they, I think, merit just a few minutes of orientation. I'm sure that all of you one way or another are engaged with the SDGs. For me they are important because they are uniquely the globally agreed objectives of the world's governments about cooperation for development in the 15-year period 2016 to 2030. In truth you might not know it all the time that they're the globally agreed objectives but indeed on September 25, 2015 the sustainable development goals were adopted by acclimation in the UN General Assembly by the world's leaders. They are, as you know, embodied within a document called Agenda 2030 which is the statement of intent and purpose for a global collaboration to achieve sustainable development during this 15-year period. These goals were adopted on September 25, 2015 and a few weeks after the Paris Climate Agreement was adopted on December 12, 2015. And it was the understanding in this process that these two agreements were linked at the hip and indeed SDG 13 at the time had an asterisk which said that what the UN was agreeing on September 25 was what would be agreed in the Paris Climate Agreement on how to control human-induced climate change. So I like to think of this agenda and the agreements reached in Paris a few weeks later as part of the same strategy. And indeed the Paris Climate Agreement opens in the preamble with the statement that this is an agreement under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change but to promote sustainable development worldwide. So sustainable development is the governing principle of these two global agreements. In the UN jargon, sustainable development means not exactly what Drew Bruntlin said in 1987 about meeting the needs of the current generation in a way that allows future generations to meet their needs but rather the triple bottom line is the real message that sustainable development means economic prosperity, social inclusion and environmental sustainability. So the idea is a three objectives simultaneously being satisfied and the goals, the 17 goals in a way group to aim to accomplish those goals, several economic objectives starting with the end of extreme poverty by 2030, SDG 1 and the end of hunger as defined by FAO by the year 2030, several guarantees of universal access to basic needs and under the UN law basic human rights, access to health, access to education, access to safe water and sanitation, access to modern energy services, SDGs 3, 4, 6 and 7, SDG 8 and 9 are about decent jobs and infrastructure and those are the main economic objectives. In social inclusion I would highlight SDG 5 gender equality and SDG 10 to reduce inequalities within and among nations and SDG 16 which is for the rule of law and peaceful and inclusive societies. As you know each of these has targets and agreed measurements alongside them. We'll be saying quite a bit about measurement. The official measurement system isn't really up to the task so there's a lot of movement of new ways to measure and getting new metrics and using what we can and developing new kinds of data which is very important part of this process because without the measurement there's no management and there's no accountability and the official systems are very slow so there's a lot of need for improvising or developing new measurements but each of the goals that I'm mentioning has within several targets sometimes very specific. SDG 3.1 maternal mortality should be below 70 deaths per 100,000 live births or under 5 mortality below 24 deaths per 1,000 births and so forth and others are more vague there should be rule of law reduced corruption and so forth which require some definition metrics and so on but it is a structure and the third dimension of the objectives is the environmental and they are mainly 11, 12, 13, 14 and 15 sustainable cities, circular economy, SDG 12, climate action which is basically the Paris climate agreement, SDG 13, conservation of marine ecology and ecosystems, SDG 14 and conservation of terrestrial ecosystems and biodiversity, SDG 15 and then SDG 17 is that the world should work together in a variety of ways to achieve these goals including several rather specific completely unmet objectives about financing that developed countries should provide committed official development assistance the debt relief which is SDG 17.4 should support the poorest countries to achieve the goals and so on so these are the global aspirations they're complicated they are not in a fundamental sense embedded in almost any country's politics with always the possible exception of Sweden which does everything perfectly but Sweden doesn't even have a government now so you can't even say that about Sweden now and in the United States they are they're in our classes they're mentioned once in a while but you would not normally expect to hear very much about this from certain political leaders and from Washington in general and the concepts are not well known in the United States and while some of the ideas are very much part of our politics local state even occasionally national this as a framing is definitely not something that has you know quickly or at even at all almost been embedded into our national discourse I serve as special advisor to the secretary general on the sustainable development goals and my main lesson from that is there are a lot of countries in the UN so I'm on the road or in the air all the time visiting the 193 UN member states and these goals actually play a surprisingly present role in dozens of countries around the world you wouldn't know it from our discourse in the United States but in almost any other country they're recognizable to the cabinet for example a president might make remarks about the SDGs in a speech there will be an interministerial task force there will be embedding the SDGs into a national plan something like that and so they have a resonance that is not what you might guess in the US context and it's a few countries maybe a couple of dozen they have a very high prominence that a government official would naturally say that is our framework we must achieve the SDGs by 2030 almost any planning minister or economy minister in the world would have this chart on their walls in the ministry and would be orienting around them and able to stand up and give a speech about what our government is doing to meet the SDGs and we also have a UN process called voluntary national review which takes place each summer where governments report what they're doing they generally of course report the good things and not the bad things so the reporting is not very systematic it's a lot of cherry picking of look at how good we are on SDGs 4, 7 and 12 not look at how miserable we are on some of the others and so forth but that voluntary national review will have involved 140 of the 193 governments by this coming summer because there's a there's a list and I think about 110 countries have reported so far and another batch of 30 or 40 will report this July this year in September and this is for us to think about as an organization there will be a summit of heads of state about the SDGs because the idea is it's a 15-year period and every four years at the head of state level there will be a summit this year's summit will be September 23-24 in New York we will have a meeting not on those two days but on the days after that a conference on sustainable development which you'll tell you about and which you're all invited to and we should think about organizing a meeting of the SDSN USA at that time certainly around that week so I'm hoping that that's a big week for public attention and public awareness worldwide on the sustainable development goals indeed it better be because the whole purpose of having a summit at the level of heads of state is that you somehow break through the confusion for a day or two to let people know and to have thousands of stories written around the world and to have television coverage of the sustainable development goals when the goals were first announced in 2012 Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and I spoke about each of the world's universities in this effort and we decided to launch the sustainable development solutions network at that moment Ted Turner immediately gave some support financially and organizationally to help us get started so SDSN began in 2012 so we're in the sixth year of trying to get the world's universities organized to play a leadership role in sustainable development and in climate change there are now about 800 or so universities around the world that are engaged in this network and there are I think the count is we're going to hear about it in a moment 27 chapters some regional some national that have gotten organized or are getting organized earlier this year Canadian universities joined together as we are today at University of Waterloo to get started in March next year universities in Mexico will come together at Tecta Monterey and Unam for the Mexican chapter so we'll have a North American grouping that can also work together on a number of regional issues last month we launched the France SDSN and also a network for the Black Sea region which is very interesting including the Caucasus, Ukraine, Turkey, Greece so a lot of countries that don't have easy relations with each other the universities always have good relations so it's wonderful about us being at universities which is we can speak and do speak the same language across continents and easily work together at times when the political forces are not as aligned as the knowledge base the science the data the evidence and the ecosystems which inevitably cut across geographical and political jurisdictions as well so just to conclude we're here to help promote the SDGs and sustainable development in the United States and promoted by an alliance of universities and the alliance of universities should be leading in a number of ways first training our students and educating our students and president Lee Bollinger at Columbia University and thank you for being here I was lucky to join Columbia the same day that president Bollinger started and from that moment president Bollinger I will say champion the idea of teaching sustainable development so we made a college major a PhD program many masters programs in sustainable development to have a full curriculum of sustainable development that is one purpose of our gathering is to promote the teaching of sustainable development and develop a generation of young people who think systemically intersectionally and with the the end purpose the telos of sustainable development and that's obviously a fundamental role for all of us a second is of course our research agenda this group knows a lot about this subject and knows also the areas where research is essential part of our purpose of being here is to do together research projects in a new way I believe in some sense I hope in part we can act like a virtual think tank that can be working together on applied research issues for example I hope we can at least for many of us those who are interested work together on how the U.S. energy system can be decarbonized in a short period of time a fundamental need and by virtue of having by the way we have 39 states represented here in universities coming from 39 states and we'll have all 50 states given the responses that we've been getting we'll have a unique opportunity to have local reality in a national scale program and so each of you will know a lot about your renewable energy resources locally available about the grid and regulatory challenges and so forth and that is a unique base for working together to produce a kind of study that otherwise cannot be produced by any of us individually so that's a second part of what I hope we will get out of this a third part is convening power and support for a political process that let's just say is very challenged it is unfortunately the case in the United States more than most high-income countries that I know that we are not planning and thinking ahead we don't have the institutions working right now in the United States to even have a 20-year energy transition we literally don't have the organizational means we don't have white papers anymore green papers policy documents assessments the things that we used to have as tools for long-term thinking are almost gone in washington and so I think we have to help to fill a gap that is really a burdensome gap right now and that means working with government officials working with elected representatives helping them to understand the realities better and what can be done and actually some prospective design measures as I mentioned we'll have two congresswomen joining us in the afternoon Alexandria Ocasio Ortiz will join by Skype and Tulsi Gabbard from Hawaii will join us in person and this is wonderful and when I mentioned it to them that we're all meeting is phenomenal we need help we need the kind of planning and knowledge base to enable us to do our jobs and so I think that this is really important for the whole US but I would say especially at the national level right now that if we can reflect a nationwide capacity to brainstorm and think and convene it could be a real contribution so all of that is to say I'm thrilled and I have already spoken too long I apologize for that but I just want to tell you thank you thank you thank you for being here maybe you should stand up because there's some people that see you otherwise yeah thank you all for being here it's really a pleasure to see this group gathered it's a special joy to have as one gets later in an academic career former students in the audience colleagues with whom I've written and worked and then so many new faces so it really is a joy to have this knowledge network emerging I am Dan Estee I've been teaching at Yale for now almost 25 years and have been working on these issues of how we measure policy performance on sustainability issues for almost that entire period I've been developing over that time with some of Jeff's colleagues at Columbia in the Earth Institute the environmental performance index which is a gauge of country scale performance on about 24 different dimensions of particularly environmental sustainability and I have seen through that and I know all of you must see the same the enormous value of having scorecards of tracking performance quantitatively of understanding who the leaders are who the laggards are of spurring some competition to keep those at the bottom of any league table from being complacent in that disappointing position the value of identifying best practices and of disseminating them and I do think that's what this network can help do with regard to the sustainable development goals I've also spent time in government in and out over those recent years I spent the late 1980s and early 1990s at the US Environmental Protection Agency doing a number of things including trying to bring quantitative measurement to environmental policy but also negotiating the framework convention on climate change of 1992 and I want to just pause for a moment and say we've learned a lot since 1992 it's an important moment to reflect on that with President George H.W. Bush lying in state but there was a moment in the 1990s when people worked together across party lines and got things done and that agreement which remains the foundation on which climate action builds today was achieved with enormous bipartisan support in fact do any of you know what the final vote of the United States Senate was on the 1992 treaty which of course no one would imagine bringing a treaty to the United States Senate today this is a good cocktail party question 980 is a good guess but not correct it was done by division of the House or the Senate in this case meaning they simply asked people to stand the vote was so overwhelming they didn't call the roll they didn't bother to even take a vote by name because the support was overwhelming what a change in the intervening generation and that is why I think we're here because while some of us believe and continue to believe that government has an important role to play it's clearly not enough and clearly not enough at the national level what we now know and what I think all of us are part of building out is that carrying the agenda of sustainability will have to overcome one of the mistakes of that 1992 framework convention and frankly of environmental policy in the 20th century more broadly which was to think the answers would come top down we now understand very clearly that a bottom-up structure of implementation is critical targets can still be set at the national and global level but the implementation the delivery of sustainability is going to have to happen at the city scale with mayors in the lead at the state and provincial scale with governors and premiers at the corporate scale and one of the joys of the last 30 years is to see how many companies are now on this agenda as opposed to resisting it and fundamentally more broadly across civil society which is where we come in it's very clear that this agenda will only move if we inspire a next generation of students to lift it and to carry it and I want to just close with one other thought which is to say that people often ask me having recently served in state government where I was the commissioner of connecticut's department of energy and environmental protection for three years having left three years ago people ask what did you learn in government what was most striking in trying to get things done at the state level and here's the answer that change is really hard to deliver even when the status quo is plainly broken so we are all stepping into a world of a plainly broken political status quo of an enormous need to take up sustainability as an overarching mission of the 21st century of what I like to say the sustainability imperative and I believe that this group will be critical to ensuring that that agenda becomes embedded in the students of tomorrow the leaders of tomorrow and the game plan of the next few years because it's not going to come alone surely from washington and probably can't come from national governments across the world state local provincial city scale corporate scale and university leadership is what's going to be required so thank you all for being part of this network we really do have an emerging community of interest I think this knowledge network that we're creating today and we'll build out over the coming years is going to be fundamental and thank you for being here as we get it launched morning everybody I'll be very brief so that we can get on with our agenda but just to give everyone the welcome as well especially for those of you have come from far away my name is Gordon McCord I'm a professor of economics at the school of global policy and strategy at the University of California and San Diego so between the northeast and San Diego we are certainly bookending the continental us although the network extends of course to Hawaii and Alaska and should extend to all the US territories and that's certainly Puerto Rico and the other territories we should include I'm a proud graduate of Columbia's PhD program in sustainable development and so I work on issues that transcend health development and the environment mostly in Africa and Latin America and now engage strongly with Mexico on its land use planning through an SDSN project that's called Fable that I'm happy to talk more about with you over the course of the day so thinking about trajectories for land use in Mexico and the US for the 21st century and also heavily involved in launching SDSN Mexico and given the integration of our two societies our economies in terms of our supply chains the migration issues the land use issues through agricultural trade were you know very very linked to the Mexican challenges and they are our challenges as well and so thinking creatively with all of you about and with the Mexico SDSN as well I look forward to thinking creatively with you thinking about how this network becomes more than the sum of our individual parts as Jeff mentioned earlier and I welcome all of you and thank you for being here from the very start of the program we have had a wonderful colleague who helped get the idea and the practice of national and regional networks started Maria Cortes Pupe from Spain and she's been a migratory part of our network starting in Spain working in Paris now working in Ottawa but working virtually all over the world to create and help to support and manage all of the 27 national and regional chapters so Maria is going to give us a an explanation of what they are where they are and how they work thank you very much welcome everyone it's so exciting to see such a packed room I feel that I've spoken almost with every one of you in the past two months let me see hang on where do I have to point okay like that towards towards where oh there we go great yeah super um so the SDSN networks program spans six continents uh Jeff was mentioning before we have about 900 member institutions across the world right now and as of today 27 national and regional networks 17 national and 10 regional networks the regional networks cover areas that make sense for some reasons so let's say for example the Amazon or the Sahel the overall objectives of these networks is to have universities working together on number one localizing the sdg so thinking really about what does this agenda specifically means for us so this is very different for a country like Canada to a country like Spain or a country like Sudan what are the specific challenges that we're going to face um do we need more granular data to observe progress in these specific challenges these kind of questions our networks are focusing on they're promoting high level education and research they're launching solution initiatives are very innovative projects that address some of these specific challenges and they're thinking about these long-term pathways for sustainable development such as what Gordon just mentioned with our project fable this is the current coverage so in green you will see our national networks in blue our regional networks and in gray those networks that are about to be launched very soon so I think it's quite exciting that we launched the Canadian network this year we're launching the US network today and then in the next few months we'll be launching Mexico other networks to come China where we've already been working through our sdg center Argentina Peru South Africa so what are some of the initiatives that these networks are doing of sorry uh let's go back here we go so sdg localization so um Dan was talking about how important data and scorecards are so for example our Spanish network has just recently launched its sdg index for Spanish cities um you'll hear more about the US sdg index for cities but the Spanish network just evaluated the performance of the 100 more more populated cities in Spain towards the sdgs and they're using these uh report as a tool to approach municipalities and work with them on policies um the sd also the Spanish sdsn has produced a series of policy briefs uh in collaboration with our health thematic network on how to achieve sdg3 so they're covering topics such as how do we pay for sdg3 or what's the role of new technologies in providing uh early assistance our uh south korean network for example in the last five years has organized up to 15 events around the topic of the sdgs and paris agreement they have produced eight substantive reports on why these are relevant agendas for korea and they have issued up to three different set of recommendations to the government either on their voluntary national review or on the way to define a strategy for implementation um our andean network for example has uh launched a project on the mira basin this is a region that is a hot spot for biodiversity at a very uh difficult political time the network was able to put researchers from both ecuador and colombia to work together with community leaders and help local policymakers to draft uh conservation strategies that were based on research results our great lakes network for example has set up so this is the african great lakes has set up a series of uh of conferences where they invite researchers from different member institutions to present their research findings and link them to the sdgs at the end about 70 percent of our networks some have achieved some sort of formal mandate from their governments to help them design the implementation strategies for the sdgs or prepare the their vnr's the voluntary national reviews in terms of education some of our networks are conducting a very systematic review of how to incorporate the sdgs in high-level education they do that in partnership with their national presidents uh association um other uh networks are launching new education programs so for example our malation sdsn has been working with the sdg academy that perhaps some of you know already this is a very high quality uh in body of uh education program online that uh we've been producing with leaders across the world so the the sdsn malaysia is working with these materials but in a blended way so they have in-person classes that are targeted at the malaysian uh students and very specific for the malaysian context um some of our networks are launching sdg focused summer programs such as our mediterranean network our amazon network and some are uh devising global partnerships so we're doing also online education with the inter-american development bank mobilizing our spanish-speaking networks some of our networks are very focused on solution initiatives so very transformative innovative projects here we're not only talking about specific uh technologies we're also thinking about uh new policy instruments um our scandinavian network for example has worked in two two different years in specific topics so oceans was the first year the second year was around the topic of migration and integration of migrants um thinking about solutions that could apply to the scandinavian context these conferences were very successful because they managed to bring together very high-level public officials but then also the private sector and philanthropists they issued two reports that have been also uh used by the government um our amazon network has done a platform to map uh different solutions that are being conducted in the amazon region and some other uh networks are looking for a specific initiative that is very promising that seems could be quite impactful for a challenge that is very important in the region and they're incubating it up up to completion um and then we believe that the best model for our networks is to have a really bottom-up approach where they're led by local leaders such as our three wonderful co-chairs uh and local institutions that are responsive to local challenges but then they are also connected to sdsn and through sdsn to sdsn's programs as well as other international organizations so uh gordon mentioned fable uh i think we're going to hear about many of the work that our sdg index team has done uh we have our thematic networks focusing on data on extractive industries agriculture cities and health and these are also bodies of work that the different national and regional networks are connecting with that's all from me uh i encourage you all to get your institutions to sign up to the network um and thank you so much once again for coming and for uh your incredible enthusiasm like to invite thank you very much maria i like to invite president lee bolinger of clumbia to come greet you and say a few words and thanks lee for for being here so um very briefly but i'm an expert in welcoming people to conferences so that's i'm incredibly shallow and uh i can do this but actually i want to say something fairly serious on this occasion i mean this is a wonderful uh wonderful achievement to put together a group of universities to do this certainly in the united states and definitely all around the world and this is a tribute to jeff and all his colleagues and uh really the capacity of jeff which is extraordinary to charismatically bring together people and institutions to uh to work on serious things and jeff is also uh one of the greatest dreamers that lives on the planet and we all benefit from jeff's dreams um what i want to say to you is that uh what you are trying to do what you are doing i think we have to acknowledge in a profound sense cuts against the structure and framework uh and the incentives and the behavior of people within our institutions that is within universities by that i mean that um we are organized in a way that no sane person would put together an institution like this it was just crazy so we essentially take very young people train them in our fields take uh some of the very best and put them right into a discipline into a department and give them extraordinary autonomy i mean it is a fact of life that no faculty member has any conception of a boss so so you you have to understand that this extreme decentralization model uh is very much inclined to produce people who think about problems in a quite different way from the ways in which you're trying to think about them and i believe the way we're trying to think about all of this at columbia i also think that the movement of many disciplines over the past generation or two generations has been away from practical problem solving and much more towards solving puzzles within a disciplinary framework more or less disconnected from the real problems of human beings and you do not have any real instinct or any structure for collaboration other than every now and then we say we're going to create this center or institute bring people together from different disciplines to work on big problems well the problem is first of all the disciplines aren't necessarily what we would want to draw on for this and secondly there's no there's no positive role for this the university allows it to happen maybe even encourages a little bit with money but it happens or doesn't happen as people sort of come forward all of this is you know a system i love dearly and i believe has advanced human welfare in many ways to extraordinary to an extraordinary degree but it does have to be we have to fight against that we have to work against that and so when you set out to create an alliance of universities especially in the magnitude that we're talking about here and you really want to work on serious problems of the world you have this problem we have this problem of how do you take institutions not just by the representatives here but more broadly and to actually bring them into a life an intellectual life a practical life that they may be ill equipped to handle or not predisposed to want to be part of i say all this by way of just a candid acknowledgement that universities do need to do what you are doing and we have various things at columbia led in many ways by the earth institute which is designed to try to do what you're doing we have many more now because it is a belief of the institution that providing institutional purpose to this kind of thing is what's needed so we now talk about four purposes of the university at columbia research teaching public service which is a kind of we need to do things for the communities that we're in and we have to engage research and not just that columbia but broadly with practical problems working with outside institutions that actually are very good at this i mean in many respects we have to also be very modest about what it is that we can do we can do some things very well but we can't do them as well as needs to be done and so we need outside partners and forming partnerships is not also easy so being practical being oriented towards human problems working collaboratively at the institutional and other levels is all a very great challenge and even ought to be one of the sustainable development goals how do you take universities and make them more involved with with human issues so that's my that's my serious issue and i'll return to the shallow part and say we're really delighted to have this here at columbia very proud of what it is that jeff is working on and his colleagues and all of you thank you very much thank you li you can see truly colleagues why we're able to make such initiatives and headway at columbia university because of president bolinger and all through his speech dan asked he was leaning over to me saying that's amazing that's amazing and and lee it is amazing and we're really really grateful to you thank you so much we're going to turn to measurement issues and some of the measurements for the united states and let me preface this by saying a few quick remarks about measurement um there is a difficulty with 17 targets i'm sorry 17 goals and 169 targets and a list of about 300 official indicators many of which have no data in them for many many countries on assessing sustainable development this is a multi objective challenge by definition and it's not easy indeed to measure precisely meaningfully and accurately most of these dimensions much less all of them in some kind of program at sds n we decided to work informally on this challenge from the start because the official processes which engage the national statistical offices across the world are as one might expect both conservative and very cautious and so there's a quite long process of developing global consistent indicators and it's very incomplete and yet the world is moving very fast at the same time ironically we're in the world of big data and instantaneous data so in principle we could know almost minute to minute about a lot of these things and probably google does or the national security agency does but for those who are doing development work sometimes we're using data five years out of date based on household surveys done seven years ago and reported by the world bank years after that and so we're in a measurement challenge and the measurement has to be for understanding the state of the system as well as for management of change as well as accountability of governments for what is happening or not happening and accountability can be on the basis of outcomes and on the basis of policies or on the basis of investments in particular areas it's a big challenge we've been producing at the sds n for several years a worldwide report card and it gets better each year it's a kind of ad hoc operation but you can find it online it's called sdg index and dashboards and with the downloadable data sets in excel and stata and country rankings and diagnostics and so forth the united states in this most recent report ranks 35th in the world on the state of sustainable development because in many of the goals in absolute terms our wealth shows through but on many of the goals especially the environmental and the social objectives the united states ranks quite poorly in fact the country at the top of the list is sweden this year and always the nordic countries show up at the top of the list because they combine high prosperity with low levels of inequality high access to essential services and a green relatively green economy though no one's really green everybody's emissions of greenhouse gases is far beyond anything remotely sustainable in the high income world so then we turn to the us in the last couple of years to do assessments at the state level you're about to hear the details of that in a moment so i'm not going to give you the bottom line but please pick up the issue of sustainable development report of the united states 2018 and also argue with it this is a first time out and you'll look at your state and say that's crazy that's not right which is very likely true of a lot of the information in here because you collected from standardized sources that can be themselves out of date or inaccurate and so on but there's a very interesting information in here a final point that i want to mention and it's something for us to think about we brainstormed a year ago on the question of politically how to try to get these ideas more effectively into the u.s politics and i want to just introduce one idea that we've had which is a tentative idea and that was to try to simplify the 17 for the u.s context to focus on what are the priorities for the u.s in this regard and so actually in a bipartisan exercise we try to summarize a subset which we called america's goals to with focus groups and some polling to see how they resonate with the public very enthusiastic by the way so focusing on access to health care access to lower cost education especially at the tertiary level focusing on political reform because that's a major issue it's part of sdg 16 but in the united states it's felt to be at a crisis dimension and so we chose eight goals and called them america's goals and also have on the back a report card on those as well so it's two different metrics but basically all sdg based we're going to have a quick summary of the findings by the the team that has been doing this i'm not sure who caroline are you starting or so who's starting jess oh you're here okay so we've done this at the cities at the state level and jessica led the city's work and jessica's about to come talk to you about that jessica sb please thanks jeff before i start a quick logistical point i was encouraged to tell people to please come forward because there's more seats at the front and there's a lot of people standing um so it's a pleasure to be with you all today um my name is jessica sb i'm a senior advisor to sdsn and for the last few years i've had the pleasure of directing our cities and our data work um and so i'm going to talk a little bit about some of the work we've been doing in the united states and as jeff said i think going back to the point that was made before by president bolinger about jeff's dreams um in 2013 14 before the sdgs had even been agreed jeff and sonja who's also here said to me let's go to detroit and let's go to baltimore and let's go to all these places and talk about the relevance and the feasibility of the sustainable development goals in those contexts because if we can't do it here where can we do it so even before the sdgs were agreed we um somewhat precociously kicked off a a project to work with a range of different cities across the united states um on the sustainable development goals so i'm just going to tell you a little bit about that and then hand over to my colleagues to talk a little bit more about the data and the metrics um firstly i don't think i really need to to go through this with everyone here because i think we're all converts to this important agenda but one of the things that we often encounter when we start conversations with different city stakeholders be they representatives from government or residents or so on is why do the sdgs matter why do they matter for my city why do they matter for me why would i care about them in my particular constituency and the first thing to say is that in the united states it's where approximately 80 of the population live within cities and the broader urban environments and urban areas surrounding um those particular cities so it is the concentration of where most of this kind of activity is going to happen the second thing to say is that the sdgs are unique in that for the first time ever really we have a global common nonpartisan way of talking about these really complex global challenges and so it's an incredibly valuable tool just to engage with residents and different stakeholders and use a common language to talk about these issues i'm not going to go through all of these issues in turn but another one that i think we'll come back to is that related to that point about this being a sort of common nonpartisan language is the sdgs are a really useful framework for peer-to-peer discussions and engagement and of course that's something that the network came to try and support but particularly for cities across the united states we've already found it's an incredibly powerful tool to start conversations between administrations that are democratic or republican to talk about um you know they're different complex sustainable development challenges on climate environment urban planning co2 reduction etc um and put fundamentally i mean the secretary general sum this up himself incredibly well what he said in 2015 the battle for the sdgs but we won or lost in cities so it really is as i said before kind of the nexus of where a lot of this is happening so um i mentioned at the beginning we started this project called the USA Sustainable Cities Initiative and what we've been trying to do with that for the last few years is to provide technical support technical resources and guidance to different cities to be expressed a strong interest and willingness to embark on the sdgs and that's really what i'm excited to think that this network will be taking forward in a much bigger much more sophisticated way um we anchored it in local universities so we started working with sjsu so that sound to say state university in california and with stanford uh with the university of baltimore as well as of course with columbia and then through those universities started engaging with different city stakeholders and i can't emphasize the importance of this arrangement enough because baltimore provides an incredibly good example we had a merrill transition during the time that we were working on these issues in baltimore and what was incredible and i'm actually going to jump straight to this slide a bit further down is that mer catherine pew came in when this process had already been working for a while but san jose state university had already looked at the sdgs they had already looked at their relevance they'd already tailored them to that particular city they'd looked at the city's metrics and what was available and where the city was ranking on different aspects and the mayor came in and she said this is great this is a an interesting non-partisan useful technical framework for analyzing sustainable development and she jumped on it straight away no questions asked and so in 2016 she immediately endorsed the sustainable development goals as a priority for the city and they were embedded into the sustainable development plan for the city so working with those kind of neutral academic institutions has been just a brilliant way of anchoring all this work anyway just to jump back other things that we've included in the project have been sort of inclusive dialogues with different communities and residents and we've worked specifically on technical processes of in san jose for example they were doing their climate smart san jose plan in boltonmore they were doing their new sustainability plan and we're going to hear more from from dan's really in a minute about new york and the one nyc strategy and what's been really crucial is to work with those existing mechanisms and see how you integrate all of the broader tenants of sustainable development into those those frameworks and then in the process of doing this there's been a range of different kind of ways of approaching it on the top you'll see the 17 sustainable development goals tailored to san jose and in the bottom you'll see the 17 sustainable development goals tailored to boltonmore these are both developed by local stakeholders in those cities so that when they talk to their residents they could say these are this is a global agenda but what do they mean for you and then for each of these goals they teased out specific targets and indicators and so on to start a meaningful dialogue i've already referred to this about political engagement the other thing we've done is we've worked on technical tools so for example with stanford university and we're working in san jose we developed an sdg dashboard which was to enable us to get really granular block level data on some of the different aspects of sustainable development and to make it accessible and a really user friendly dashboard where you could look really as low as you know your grid of streets to see how you're performing on your co2 emissions or whatever so there's been a way of different trialing this of kind of testing new approaches and and excitingly we've seen more and more attention to this we're seeing more and more cities becoming engaged and i'm excited we have a representative from los angeles here today they're now a new partner that we're working with very closely to try and advance this in in certain cities across the united states so moving forward and we're partnering with more and more cities we are trying to work with other us networks of course this one is the anchor institution but with also with groups like the urban sustainability directors network the urban institute and so on who are also starting to think about this a really crucial partnership is the us conference of maz as kind of the coordinating body for local government in the united states and we're very excited that the sdg is becoming much more prominent in the conference of maz itself and we're optimistic there's going to be an sdg summit in hawaii next year as across the united states and then as jeff mentioned we've also developed kind of advocacy oriented and technical reference materials including the us cities index which we produced in 2017 and in 2018 i'm not going to go into huge detail on this index because we're going to do a deep dive on the state level index which is the complementary product and they're very similar but we found this to be an incredibly helpful tool for starting a dialogue particularly with policymakers and local governments and it they include a range of different tools we have dashboards which show different cities and metropolitan areas performance across the different goals using a color coded chart and we've shown overall index scores weighted by population bubbles in the bottom left there we show the average score for all msa's by different sdg so cities by different sdgs and so on and each of these more technical resources again i've just been invaluable both to actually have a very evidence based discussion about progress but also to kick start a conversation amongst the city administration but also residents on what this really means in the particular area so that's what we've been doing to date and this is really the work that i hope that this network can advance on take forward build upon and do so in a much more rigorous way than we in our little initial pilot phase we're doing and so yeah i'm really excited to be here today for this very exciting occasion so with that i'm going to hand over to dan's really from new york city dan has been anchoring the process around one nyc and of course that is very closely aligned with the sdg so he's going to give us a bit more of a tailored discussion about what new york's been doing on this and why at the sdgs matter here in our host city thank you thanks just uh good morning everybody i hope you're all enjoying a nice uh i guess fall early winter day in new york city um on behalf of mayor bill the boss i'm just i'm thrilled to be here i want to thank jeff for uh the invitation to be able to come in uh address uh you today and all of you for for pulling time out of your day to really think about these important issues of uh sustainable development my name is dan's really uh i'm the one nyc director for new york city which one nyc is a word that probably doesn't mean too much to anybody outside of uh city government at this point but it's really new york city's strategic plan and the way that we're preparing ourselves for the challenges of the future and there's a little bit of history that i'll walk through in terms of what that has actually meant for us since 2015 and even before and what that means for us now um in a lot of ways new york city was shaken to consciousness by an event hurricane sandy uh about six years ago that launched us on a whole different trajectory for how we think about uh the issues of climate sustainability what it means to be a global 21st century leader given threats that we face and from that moment on it caused us to think anew about these challenges which ultimately in 2015 culminated in the first release of our one nyc document our strategic plan that in various forms uh is was the world's first resilience strategy through our partnership with 100 brazilian cities and in in so many ways and with jeff's leadership as our the co-chair of our advisory board was the is the first local manifestation of the sustainable development goals in fact predated by a few months um because we had a little bit of a heads up of what was coming predated the sustainable development goals to the point where we've even mapped our strategic plan against the sdgs let me give you a little sense of what that actually means um we as we were going through the challenges that are facing new york city much like you would look at the challenges facing the globe we're a growing city we're going to be nine million people by 2040 uh that population is aging that population uh continues to be a high percentage of foreign born with understanding what that means for our city and how the city services need to react um at the same time we have a continuing inequality crisis in new york city at the time of our strategic plan release in 2015 45.1 percent of new yorkers living at or near the poverty line um we are also facing other challenges of course climate near the top of that list our transportation system needing renewal um a number of areas where the quality of life here in new york city could be at risk if we don't do the right things and put in place the right strategies to address them and so in 2015 with the release of one nyc we put forth a new vision for new york city a blueprint to build a strong and just city across four primary visions or pillars of growth that we're a growing city but we also need to make sure that we're managing that growth smartly and investing in uh economic development and jobs and transportation and housing at the same time confronting and for the first time in the in any city strategic plan here in new york city calling out equity as a prime pillar uh as a as a as a driving force of what we're doing in new york city government to address that inequality crisis in that 45.1 percent uh uh poverty level here in new york city and for the first time laid out a target that we're going to lift 800 000 new yorkers out of poverty or near poverty over 10 years uh and fighting for the the wage increases that we need in here in new york city and uh um paid leave and other elements that really provide economic security and a safety net uh to those that need it here in new york city and at this and then moving on our sustainability goals setting and adopting at the time an 80 by 50 target 80 percent reduction of our greenhouse gases by 2050 and making sure that we're investing what we need to do coming back to that point around sandy that we know that threats are coming from climate change investing to make sure that we are uh preparing for those threats for for more heat for more rain for sea level rise and all of the implications that that means for a city like new york new york and so you know and i'm of course taking this down to the local level um the sdgs have had incredibly important focus for us in order to connect what we're doing to the larger global conversation of making sure that we are meeting the goals and in in a context when the american government is withdrawing from national from global agreements whether it's the paris agreements or really not focusing as jeff said uh in any substantive way on sustainable development goals what we find is that it's it's the cities of the united states that are stepping up to fill that void in leadership and colleagues from la here know this for for sure cities across the country are stepping up to fill that void and making sure that we're keeping ourselves on track and uh and really demonstrating that whatever's going on in washington dc the political leadership across the country is still connected and uh and aware of the global goals and acting and investing to meet them so all of that being said um we now have been uh nearly four years three and a half years past the release of our strategic plan and you could look at this as a test case for how to deliver on sustainable development have a deliver on the the challenge of what we have in new york city and we release a progress report every year in which we actually lay out here's how we're doing against the targets we've said 800 000 new yorkers out of poverty 80 percent reduction in greenhouse gases and we've been very transparent laying out the fact that um you know we've been doing really good i think there's a number of indicators across the city where we're at record low unemployment jobs are at record highs crime is low at the same time we've cut our greenhouse gases 15 percent since uh since our 2005 baseline a lot of trajectory is going in the right direction but we have so much more to do before we'll ever be satisfied because we know these challenges are only growing and we are updating now that strategic plan in 2019 we're going to be releasing an update a revision to that strategic plan to make sure that we are keeping ourselves on track to make sure that we are really taking into account the way that the world continues to change on us and believe me the world has changed quite a bit since 2015 when you look back at over the last couple years and all of that has made us think a new about the challenges we face and yes our population growth and what's happening with inequality certainly everything we've been seeing in the drumbeat of bad news on climate has caused us to want to accelerate our own actions and divesting from fossil fuels and investing in climate solutions but also to look even wider at the types of the type of city we want to be in 2050 and making sure that we are on track to deliver on the commitments that we've set as a city as part of our initiative into the globe now one way that this has actually really come to life in a very direct way with the SDGs is in July our in cooperation with our office of international affairs we released and Jeff mentioned the the voluntary national reviews well because the United States wasn't actually doing a voluntary national review we thought let's maybe there's a way that to spur some conversation and to you know adopt that leadership mantle ourselves here on SDGs and we released our own local a voluntary local review of New York City's actions against the SDGs which very much draws on our one NYC statistics and the the progress reports we've been releasing every year but we've we took that into into the SDG language and translated some of the local things that we have on one NYC into our into the global language to really demonstrate that cities can step up and be part of this conversation and since that point other cities have indicated interest in doing that they've been reaching out to us to figure out how to do that Helsinki has as one notable example has committed to doing a voluntary local review based on what we've been able to adopt and I think others are going to step up and do that as well particularly here in the United States as a way to connect to the to the larger global conversation so I wanted to just come in and I thought it was important to make sure that the connection to the local here becomes real in cities and to make sure to demonstrate that American cities are in this conversation and are feeling the weight of what's happening in Washington DC and finding ways to step up our own action and we applaud everyone here in this room for stepping up and and helping support that effort across the the entirety of the SDSN network across the US and make sure that we are connecting the university space and professionals and practitioners and cities and states where the action is actually happening here and so it's it's just my pleasure to be here this morning with you and to address the crowd and thank you to Jeff for having me here today and enjoy the rest of your day thank you very much. Hi everyone I'm Anna Lopresti I'm from the SDSN USA network team my colleagues Caroline Fox and Elena Lynch will also be speaking because we'll be helping out managing the network we wanted you to get a little bit of face time with all three of us but I'll be introducing the concept of localizing the SDGs to the state level any thoughts on this great so as Jess and Dan both mentioned there's such a concentration of population and economic activity and activity around the SDGs in cities and when you think about a land use perspective the state becomes increasingly important because that 96% of land that's not within cities supports those populations and those economies and the state level is uniquely positioned to deal with some of those challenges because they have to think about that nexus of land use mixes and on top of that they also incorporate the rural populations that are often very important to the leave no one behind agenda and I think that states can start to follow suit the way that cities have on stepping up on on this type of agenda that being said we produced earlier this year a 50 state ranking of the SDGs at the state level it uses 103 indicators that were locally available data for all 50 states it includes 15 of the 17 SDGs and it's in conjunction with the cities and the global index that has already been produced so we just wanted to highlight here that these three indices that SDSN has produced they can function as an individual tool that they also function really well together as a collective tool that can be used we had the advantage of producing the state index last so we intentionally tried to align the data from the city's level and from the global level into the state index so the numbers on this diagram show the number of indicators that overlap between all three levels and we think that this provides a good deal of coherence you can scale up or scale down depending on the issue that you're looking at and that it kind of can be used as a three tiered tool in and of itself so this is a map of the results of the 2018 sustainable development report we'd like to highlight that the scale here is from zero to 100 where 100 would be a dark green and zero is a dark red and you can see that not a single state on here is green which really means that even the states that are performing the best have a long way to go to be on track for achieving these SDGs by 2030 and there is a big range within the goals but on that zero to 100 scale the best performing state had a score of 61 out of 100 and the worst performing state had a score of 31 so there's a lot of progress to be made here if you look at the overall map there's a really strong geographic clustering this is a map of the nine census regions in the U.S. by their score and of course all the SDGs are interrelated but as Jeff mentioned earlier if you do break them into these three general categories of social, economic and environmental goals you can start to see that even within the regional variation there's also variation across performance when you look at the type of goals so I think it's quite telling that across all regions on the social subset of SDGs the states perform significantly worse. Here's the dashboard of results so across the top are the SDGs that were included in the index and then down the side are the states in rank order which are quite small but really what we'd like to show here is that even the SDGs that are have made the most progress still are not doing particularly well on this index you can see that the two goals that have made the most progress across the states are clean water and sanitation and responsible consumption which is goal 12 the three that have made the least progress are no poverty climate action and peace justice and strong institutions and you can kind of visually see that with these red lines running straight up the dashboard even for the best performing states at the top of that ranking and I think this is just to say that as we move forward with the rest of the day it's important to think about localization at different scales the city has particular issues the state has particular issues and combining forces and looking at the SDGs at different scales can kind of provide more nuance and more context and our index results showed that there is a lot of progress to be made in the states and there are some specific areas that we think are the most pressing so I'll pass it off to my colleague Elena to discuss that. Thank you Anna as Jess mentioned earlier these indices are an opportunity to mobilize action spur collaboration and our tool for connecting stakeholders across the public private and academic spheres and with that in mind we wanted to talk about opportunities for further action by highlighting the gaps in progress and then later my colleague Caroline will highlight gaps in understanding that may be food for thought for you as you have conversations today and brainstorm about how you might want to work together with this network so one of the major findings that we had in this index and also this aligns with the work from the city's index as well is that urgent action on the leave no one behind agenda is needed the leave no one behind agenda came out of the millennium development goals the UN's first set of development goals and that leave no one behind agenda basically says that those who are the furthest behind need to be reached first and who might be furthest behind will vary across cultural and geographic context but these are the general identities that are covered by the leave no one behind agenda and they include the poor the elderly children religious and ethnic minorities women and gender non-conforming individuals migrants refugees indigenous people and people in rural areas overall inequality is a major part of the leave no one behind agenda as Dan had just mentioned and this is high in the US that's probably not as surprised to anyone in this room as it's high in New York City and probably where you live as well one of the indicators we included in our report was the genie coefficient and that indeed showed that inequality is high across the US but there are other ways to see inequality reaching into this agenda we included several leave no one behind indicators as a way to measure impact of progress from the most marginalized these are the eight indicators that we included that specifically look at the leave no one behind agenda and that all of them require urgent action for example contraceptive deserts in this best performing state 78% of women in need are not live in contraceptive deserts similarly around affordable housing on average only 39 affordable and available rental units are available for 100 families who are in need of those services so you can see that we have a significant progress to be made on these leave no one behind indicators but there's significant progress to be made also at the goal level if we look at the goals that are performing most poorly we see that the poverty goal the gender equality and the justice goal are the worst performing indicators and this again goes back to the inequality that's central to this leave no one behind agenda I'll highlight one last example as a food for thought this is the energy burden in the US you can see that not only is there serious inequality when it comes to energy burden but there's inequality across the states so energy burden is a both an energy indicator and a leave no one behind indicator and even the best state has a is has 10 times the energy burden that is recommended to hit the 2030 target and the worst state is 20 times so there's quite a bit of progress to be made particularly around this agenda I'll leave you with no matter what way we cut it we are leaving people behind here in the US I hope that this energy burden example can help you think about no matter what industry or area you're working on the leave no one behind agenda has something to offer you and that the leave no one behind agenda and the work around that can be included in no matter what project you're thinking about it's clear that to make all of this progress it will require the coordinated effort of everyone in this room and so I'm so glad that you're here to help us think about that I'm I'll now turn to Caroline hi everyone I am Caroline Fox I'm thrilled to be here with you today launching this network and really excited to hear from you coming after this presentation as we begin the discussion around these ideas and continue it through the day as we have different presenters come forward so Elena talked about the need to close gaps on progress to achieve the SDGs but Jeff mentioned earlier that there are a number of measurement challenges that we face as well so I'm just going to touch on a few examples that we think might be interesting ways to consider approaching these issues across state lines across city lines and across the traditional silos that many of us experience in the institutions that we all work excuse me working so this is a map of Indian land areas and American Indian reservations as Elena highlighted in order to achieve the SDGs in the US we'll need to pay particular attention to groups that are marginalized including indigenous populations and as you can see here these groups these territories cover more than 35 states in the US and they're not they're not within particular states the we can't look at this when we're doing for example the state index that we're discussing now or the city index that was spoken out earlier some indigenous peoples live on reservations others in sovereign tribal lands with federal federally nationalized treaties and still others are embedded in larger communities throughout the countries for minority and marginalized communities in the US we have to grapple with the lack of data availability we have to think about there's there's a lack of disaggregation and small sample sizes achieving the goals will require all of us to look beyond the geographic boundaries to look beyond the boundaries of the data that we have presently and think through how can we address these trans boundary issues within our country this is a map that shows the impact of fertilizer runoff from the great plains in midwest into the Gulf of Mexico creating a dead zone which has a terrible impact as you can imagine on the ecosystem health and on life below water which is our goal 14 it'll strike you if you look at our state index that we weren't able to measure a goal 14 at the state level although we can see that even states that are non-coastal are having an impact on our oceans we don't have a way to measure this and trying to think about it at the state level is quite difficult thinking about at the city level is also quite difficult so we need to think more broadly beyond our local efforts while as many people have mentioned this agenda requires us to build from the bottom up and work locally some of these issues expand beyond our communities and the impacts of our individual and collective actions can't be measured through the traditional mechanisms that we have in place so target 17 is another one that we were unable to include in our state report because the indicators that are provided are suggested by the UN don't they're all focused on global collaboration so you know I think in this room today we're here because we understand that in the US we have states and cities and the amount of people here is beyond what exists in many countries throughout the world in fact most individual states have larger populations than countries some of that are doing very well by the way on the global rankings so our challenges are really unique and I think that we need to consider applying the global partnerships mentality to our work here and I think that's why we're in the room today so I'm hopeful that we can continue the conversation about how we address transboundary issues and think about how we can escape our silos to work on some of these broad overarching and multidisciplinary tasks that we need to achieve that STGs thank you I look forward to talking with you all well thanks thanks a lot and if Caroline Elena and Anna could stand up one more time I want you to know them because they're holding the all of the efforts together and and doing a great analytical work and the reports and they were in outreach with all of you in in recent weeks to bring us together together with Maria so phenomenal work and we're most grateful I also want to thank Jen Gross who was here Jen if you would stand up to say hello Jen Gross is a wonderful leader in sustainable development and a wonderful supporter of all of this effort a great philanthropist and an incredible friend of SDSN from the very beginning and makes it possible for us to be here and is supporting the work and so we really want to thank you impossible without you so thank you so much I hope that part of the the residents with you in campuses around the country is engagement with your cities and with the states and that we can think about and you will be thinking about ways to do that many things are underway no doubt but new things could be underway one idea that's already come up from one of the universities is a state network that the university would host and bring together some of the smaller colleges and and universities around the state in order to engage with the state legislature the governor the state level problems and that is a wonderful idea and so if we had networks of networks I want to encourage that this is an open brainstorming process of how to continue to scale but probably having a an SDSN with at a state level that you could champion to bring together other schools and the major cities the and the and the state governments could be a tremendous opportunity for engagement and for research and for analysis we heard from Dan Zerilla just now with the idea of cities doing sdg voluntary reporting of course first they have to do alignments and when we speak to mayors they're interested it's a new tool for them they may not know about it but it actually fits the city need and it's not a stretch it's a helpful tool if they want accountability and if they want metrics and direction this is something that only you could really champion at the local level to make it possible with engagement data and so on the national effort will support you in that with ideas with metrics with the examples with consultation if that's helpful but it's something that I would like you to to take up and come up with the ideas that make sense for you the leave no one behind agenda is is really very well poignantly and powerfully put analytically in what you've just seen but I think it behooves us to note that last week we learned that life expectancy has declined for the third consecutive year in the united states this is absolutely unprecedented in the high income world we've had three consecutive years of life expectancy declining by a tenth of a year each year since 2014 and no other high income country in the world is experiencing this this is a epidemic of opioid overdoses of suicides of despair we have a massive depressive disorder epidemic in the united states people are not only falling behind but they're losing their lives to an extent that it's showing up in a metric that was almost inconceivable as a national trend until recently so this is not a fine point this is a crisis and again I think addressing this at the national and the state level or at the global level but using a nationwide network is something that we should really contemplate as as a group we're going to now turn to a an issue that I think is one of the most important and policy relevant and where only a group like this could do the deep work that's required vj modi you're going to come up here yeah my wonderful colleague in the engineering school at columbia vj professor of civil engineering but just to put it in general whenever I need to understand something I call vj because he I don't know how but he knows everything about everything so he always explains to me what's what's going on especially around our physical world and technology and we're going to be joined on skype with jim williams jim williams is a remarkable energy modeler who has produced he produced what I found to be the best clearest study in published in science I think in 2012 but it was an incredible eye-opener for me on how to make a pathway analysis to deep decarbonization that was done first for california and then he helped lead a global effort under sdsn where 16 country teams took on the challenge how would you get at that point it was down 80 percent in emissions by 2050 now the ipcc tells us we have to get down to zero basically by 2050 but jim has been doing wonderful modeling work and I do have a dream that as a group we somehow present what doesn't exist right now is a detailed locally articulated nationally linked us strategy for decarbonization and this is what the next session will discuss I'm going okay then that's not mine oh you want jim first yeah should I start jim we can hear you well so please go ahead great thank you thanks everybody okay so I'm going to give an update on the sdsn's activities in the area of deep decarbonization that I've been involved in it started about five years ago when sdsn and its partner idry in france initiated the deep decarbonization pathways project where research teams from the 16 highest emitting countries around the world develop national blueprints for limiting global warming and our goal was to change the climate policy discussion from a focus on marginal changes to one on transformational changes and to take a long-term perspective on that problem and the result of that was the development of individual studies for each of those 16 countries that were published before the cop 21 in paris that described blueprints for achieving deep levels of carbon reduction by mid-century and the is everybody seeing my cards my slides jim can you please pray play on your screen there at the bottom we can see the grid we just need you to press play at the bottom left you had your you just had your mouse on it on the slide show view bottom left of your screen bottom left of my screen just full screen for the powerpoint jim it's at the very bottom the third tab sorry everybody um you can also press play at the top there a top right above the idb one yeah nope i'm seeing it it's right there above the idb slide says play a big green triangle a little bit that's not how it appears on mine i'm very sorry um should we change the order of the presentation because i'm not seeing the screen that you're talking about um go ahead and keep presenting we have your powerpoint slides back here so you might pull them up just let us know and we'll press we'll advance the slides if you just let us know when to okay so right now click you have a now click so all right keep presenting and we'll we'll download your slides and just let us know when to advance is that work yeah sure okay so um great thanks so i meant the slide that has the eiffel tower on it are you able to throw that shayan i apologize for the technical difficulties but i'm not seeing the same thing that you're describing friend if we can meanwhile download jim slides and then we can advance it locally here that may work very well so should i if you want i can go okay perfect we can see you jim and your slide is up okay great thank you sorry for the technical difficulty yep so anyway um the um the work of the deep decarbonization pathways project and the development of all of those um feasible strategies for um achieving high levels of carbon reduction influenced the outcome of the paris agreement and article for paragraph 19 all parties should strive to formulate and communicate long-term greenhouse gas emission development strategies i think was a direct product of the work of the ddpp now i'm going to talk a little bit about some of the things that have followed from that work one was uh the development of a 2050 pathways handbook by the european climate foundation that uh uh was really an extraction of the lessons learned by the project i co-authored this with my counterpart um onry weissman at idry uh the inter-american development bank uh this year launched a new project called deep decarbonization in latin america and the caribbean with participation from the country shown in this slide and um it is a direct follow on to the ddpp um in the in the um south american region um in the united states the uh work that we did for the ddpp is contained in two reports pathways to deep decarbonization in united states and and policy implications of deep decarbonization in the united states and the questions that those um those reports asked or is it technically feasible to achieve 80 percent greenhouse gas reduction below 1990 levels by 2050 what would it cost and what physical changes are required and uh what are the policy implications and so uh very briefly the um the result of that was a demonstration of multiple feasible technology pathways that do achieve an 80 percent reduction by 1990 they're shown here and that the cost of this effort is affordable that taking into account increased cost for some kinds of higher efficiency and and low carbon uh technologies um and the avoided cost of consuming fossil fuels that the net cost of supplying and using uh energy was less uh than about one percent of gdp jim okay we are on the us pathways analysis slide could you just say next slide when you want us to switch okay so move forward two slides to one that says deep decarbonization cost is affordable okay we are there and next time you want to switch just let us know great thank you sorry for the difficulties here um so the the point is number one uh we found that deep decarbonization in the united states is um is technically feasible that there are multiple pathways to achieve it so that if some technologies don't materialize there's other ways of doing it and that is this slide shows that the cost um is affordable a um an analysis of our results by a third party that's shown in the bottom left uh looked at the macroeconomic um implications of this and actually found that uh these low carbon scenarios led to uh gains in gdp and jobs um and the united states as a whole although um not in all regions of the united states next slide um so uh the these results are are founded on three pillars that said in all cases um uh regardless of what the specific technology approach is um to achieve deep decarbonization you need a combination of high levels of energy efficiency of um very low carbon electricity and uh of electrification of end uses that is switching from direct fossil fuel combustion to using electricity itself or electric fuels that are produced from electricity such as hydrogen or synthetic natural gas um some of the um effects of that work are reflected uh in the next slide um uh the us mid-century strategy developed by the obama administration was strongly influenced by that work um next slide um and uh there are two other studies that um uh actually used uh the us ddpp analysis as their foundation on the left uh that's the risky business um groups uh uh uh from risk to return investing in a clean energy economy on the right side uh in rdc's america's clean energy frontier um both of those are uh draw heavily from the work next slide um uh the work uh really began and continues on in california um uh where pathways analysis has been um a foundation of california's energy and climate policy um for a long time it actually goes back to uh 2006 where the same kind of analysis uh has been done for state agencies uh that are planning the low carbon transition in california next slide um some more recent work include studies of deep decarbonization in the northeast on the left hand side you see the cover of a report from this year um that looked at the uh cooperation with with hydro kebec to uh basically repurpose its hydro system in order to support high levels of renewable development in the northeast to reach uh low carbon um uh electricity generation required for deep decarbonization on the right hand side um this is deep decarbonization in northwest specifically uh washington state the governor's office um uh did a similar kind of study for the state of washington next slide um some other sort of uh directions that that work is gone uh this summer uh in the trade journal in the electricity business uh i triple e's power and energy magazine it was dedicated to um uh the the importance of electrification in low carbon energy systems and um we were invited to write the lead editorial on that um uh out of sort of recognition of the of the role that um uh sdsn's work has in in raising the profile of this of this issue in the industry um another direction that the work is gone is in the relationship between low carbon energy and land use um uh and uh that uh next slide um uh recently led to a uh uh a meeting under of the low emission solutions conference uh in california during the global climate action summit on land energy and climate change that was hosted at my home institution the university of san francisco but we had um uh well over 200 people attend an all day meeting that looked at the um interface between uh land energy and climate change and that uh topic is a uh a key focus of another sdsn initiative the fable initiative you may hear more about fable today so i won't uh go into that uh next slide um many of you are probably aware of the recent ipcc report on global warming 1.5 degrees c next slide um uh this slide shows some of jim hansons uh work on where the planet needs to get to in um uh its emissions trajectories in order to keep uh temperatures well below 1.5 degrees c and on a uh path toward return to climate normalcy um at the target that he has identified is reaching 350 parts per million of co2 in the atmosphere by the end of the 21st century next slide so this uh shows very briefly a preliminary result for um work that we're doing that we hope to be published um uh early next year um that has 350 ppm scenarios we believe that this is um the first time that uh such scenarios have been um modeled within a specific country and in the level of um technical detail that um that's been applied in this case and the basic answer is yes uh 350 ppm um uh is an achievable trajectory for the united states that is 350 ppm compatible um and uh we are in the process of laying out what exactly that will require um next slide another direction the work is taken is um a book project led by michael gerard of columbia university and his colleague uh john dernbach uh called uh legal pathways to deep decarbonization in the united states um there's a short version of that uh being published um anytime now and then uh there'll be a rollout of the full book um many hundreds of pages produced by uh about 40 legal scholars who are looking at all the different aspects of deep decarbonization sometime in the spring and you may hear from from michael or you might hear from alana uh in contact with michael uh more about um the planning for that rollout uh which will happen also in nestius and venue um a uh a final um activity uh uh more on my personal level but it's um another legal related one which is the juliana versus united states lawsuit also known as our children's trust and so um uh i've been asked to be one of the expert witnesses on behalf of the uh plaintiffs who are um who are asking the united states government to take um much stronger action on uh climate change and that work is based on the us the expert report the testimony i've given uh has been based on the usd decarbonization uh work next slide uh and that's that's it for me okay sorry for the technical difficulties but i hope that gives people an idea of um of what we've been up to for the last couple of years and thanks jim are you going to be able to stay on the line to answer some questions after vj's presentation before we break i actually have another presentation in in just a few minutes um no i'm afraid but anyway thank you all very much thank you jim thank you jim okay jim has given us a wonderful kind of very big picture overview i'll try to zoom in a little bit into new york state and new york city okay first of all i'm kind of the glass half full guy so i will focus on opportunities and not challenges okay this is the beautiful city we live in in fact the photo is taken not far from here maybe you can even see this from jeff's office so you can bombard his office but almost not almost all of the work is done by young students so i'm just taking credit okay so next next slide i just want to new york state i just want to say one simple thing and this is not this is going to be a situation for many cities it's sort of we are below that green arc half of the demand is below that green arc but the actual low carbon sources are very small below the green arc and about to get even smaller if we retire indian point nuclear i'm not going to take positions there about the green arc further out you go that's where the resources are okay and then i'll come to offshore in a minute but onshore resources of wind are there land is there i think it's going to be extremely important that those people upstate who have to do something for their land do not feel they're doing it for you know four dollar cappuccino drinkers in the city so i think this is going to be a very big issue right and we need interestingly there are solutions there are lessons there are and it doesn't cost a whole lot so i think being sensitive to people who are poor who are going to actually contribute somehow and and rewarding them is going to be very important we have done models which take into account transmission storage onshore solar offshore various constraints of demand but i just want to give you one simple next slide result for new york state so you know that's new york state on the left but the most important point i want to make here is that actually getting to 50 or 60 percent renewables is not hard and because academics fret about analyzing 80 and 100 percent which is hard today at today's technologies i hope we don't create a kind of paralysis by analysis so we need to send the message that the first 50 60 is actually not that hard there are of course issues right but we they're they're solvable and it's not like we need absolutely say oh unless we develop new batteries we can't do it unless we do you know tens of gigawatts of transmission we can't do it i i think the most important message is this graph starts at 50 percent at 50 percent you see the green line transmission the purple line storage not a big deal we do need to worry about distribution lines distribution wire and that's where the action is going to be but i don't think we have to and and you increasingly see the role the yellow line of offshore wind it's a phenomenal resource i'll come to that in a slide down the road so i think so i think the point is okay so the next slide and i want to zoom into one issue let me ask you if you if if as new york city if you look at four things transportation industry buildings and agriculture which one has the most contributor to emissions it's not agriculture built environment has the biggest now so the but the point is before we go to the next slide is off that built environment not because our buildings are inefficient yes there are in part in some places but at a macro level that's not the message the message is because we don't do agriculture here because we are good with transportation and because we don't have massive industry buildings show up to be important but what's important is the dominant emissions from buildings are not due to electricity today our electricity actually is fairly clean to start with who will get cleaner as i showed in the earlier slide our biggest challenge is heating because that comes exclusively from oil and gas okay and i'll come to that and the point is tried we need to figure out how to protect the poor and vulnerable as we make that transition and i want to say that ability it should not come at sacrificing comfort for the poor it should not come at higher cost for the poor and yet it can be green and i'm going to say automation is going to play a big role in this so next slide so i already said that you know so next slide now what's interesting is that the challenge right now focus on the lowest curve which shows that the peak electricity demand in new york city is in the summer because of air conditioning utilities are used to it everything is used to that as we go to decarbonize heating you can see that the curve which is a monthly curve completely flips and it becomes peak in the winter but what's good news first of all the most important good news is that to go to 30 percent of electric heating you don't violate the summer peak you actually sell more electricity if you are a utility without massively upgrading capacity that we should leverage as an initial ability to go to 30 percent in heating without even then the next slide shows that interestingly the blue curve which is wind is better aligned with the new peaks right so we have and if we do this for offshore it's even better and i'll come to that in a minute so my point is i'm just trying to show the opportunities where the glass is half full okay next slide so and you can you can sort of so yeah the the point of these arrows is you know those are monthly averages those are monthly averages and wind will fluctuate everywhere from zero to the peak but yet so if we can go back to the previous slide just yet it can actually help reduce our current gas consumption through automation and the reason is that the scale at which the timescale at which the gas system works is much longer than the timescale of variability in the wind so those of you who are here last christmas and this past new year we had 10 straight days in the northeast where the average temperature was below 15 degree fahrenheit the mean temperature we had our gas prices our electricity prices went through the roof 50 times on gas 10 50 times we need to address that and this can be addressed because we have background storage in gas but we can get to significant reduction and leverage the existing gas system to get there so it will not be just one or the other right away it will be like a hybrid car but hopefully cheaper next time next slide now i think understanding heating at a national level is important this is literally fresh off the press i'm not even sure if it's 100 right but but in the sense of like 100 accurate right but but it's the it is driven by census tract level data you can see who heats with natural gas this is going to be important you can see who heats with natural gas you're saying hey what happened in upstate new york what's new hamshire vermont main what's happening there so you go to the next slide they are heating with oil and propane okay so so we now know where the challenges are now interestingly parts of the country which didn't require too much heat and had cheap electricity which is the next slide shows that they are already using electricity okay but it is a it is somewhat of a kind of miss you know it it's like the map that the republicans might show for where they won right is it it's a very low density areas with very low consumption has a hard time getting gas pipelines so they're electric but the bulk of the people are not in the bulk of the consumption where it is cold is not where you see the dark part so i just want to point out but i think the next slide is what gets all electricity planners worried and i think the question is we need to figure out solutions to that worry so this shows that if you decarbonize heating you will create a peak that is much larger than the current peak and what is the ratio of the new peak to the current peak because that new peak will be last only few days note that it is much colder compared to 72 Fahrenheit than it is hotter right therefore the peak from electric is much electric heating is much higher than the peak from air conditioning and that ratio is worst in two parts of the country it's in the northeast because we use very little electricity for heating and it is cold it also happens to be in another part of the country that i'm not studying too much so i won't say much about that okay but the point is that we can address this and on that little cartoon thing on the right you see that we have a phenomenal offshore wind resource that offshore wind resource is literally 20 30 miles from where we are sitting here not having to build massive transmission lines right now i want to there we have another challenge but i want to highlight that when we did the state called for bidding two years ago the price was 23 24 cents a year later it was nearly half of that this year it might be half of that it's not that we suddenly figured out in new york state how to make the price one fourth it's just when you get a new industry started all the supply chains all the mechanisms of all the different people and skills that are needed have to ramp up but we have ramped up pretty quickly two years so i think there should be also acceptance of the fact that initially to develop a new industry new sources new supply chains new skills does take some resources in the big picture we did it very efficiently only with 90 megawatt we got to half another 800 megawatt we got to further half so that's pretty good you know so i just want to point that out that's not just saying oh we are making a better turbine blade that's just through creating economies of scale in installation so the other remark i want to make is that i think the next step here and you know i'm not going to go into great details of all the models we are doing but what i showed on the electricity side is that 60 percent is not hard on the heating side 30 percent is not hard this peak will stay the same for the first 30 percent and i think we should do that and we should figure out the how to protect the vulnerable we don't want to be in the Paris situation where it's oh gas prices and you know you have to change your clunker car because you are you know it's not so good so we have to figure that out and i think that will require a you know deeply sensitive collaborative conversation but the point is that actually the poor and the vulnerable can play a very big role in this some of these technologies are actually going to increase their thermal comfort if we figure out a way to direct our policies to do some of this in their buildings first again all four things have to be done it has to be enhanced thermal comfort it has to create saving it has to reduce emissions and at the same time it will be through automation so i want to show just the last two three slides very quickly that that automation we are doing in other parts of the world this mini-grid completely digital completely automated was installed in two days next slide you know we are doing data analytics to manage real-time loads this is in Uganda the previous slide okay next slide this is in Uganda also low-cost smart internet of things devices that robustly control things this is sort of the low-cost version of what goes on in a hybrid car but for a home and next slide is we are doing flexibility of load for farmers where you are scheduling loads so farmers are adapting to the solar supply rather than supply having to adapt to demand driving down cost so i think these are the same principles we need to do here it was actually easier to do in many places where they didn't have electricity because there was nobody in the way so finally that's where i'm going to end with the next slide thank you and there are many opportunities and i've sort of highlighted them just to give you an ironic example we are working with the government of Qatar which has asked us to figure out how to be lower emissions and it's fascinating that ice storage in the bottom middle may play an important role and cost effectively do it in a country with one of the lowest gas prices but also happens to have the most wonderful sunshine so thank you very much and you know that that's that's my presentation yeah we can go to the last slide if needed yeah amazing yeah really fantastic i i have a question and a uh a thought which is how can we do this kind of planning as a group nationwide does that make sense what would it be and the reason is just one one quick thought we cannot win this climate debate without credible plans for what to do it's not enough actually to show that there's a horror happening and a horror ahead without an agenda of what the transformation looks like as far as i know there is no detailed national strategy it's never been made the department of energy has never done it when we had Steven Chu who's brilliant and could have done it the politics did not allow him to do it so we don't have this kind of analysis therefore the politics is completely divorced from the potential and i think no congressperson knows what does this mean for my district what would the energy alternatives really be other than what he or she might be able to gather in a newspaper in some ill-informed column today the wall street journal does its usual weekly bullshit of say there's no no use to this why are we wasting our time the riots in Paris show this agenda of decarbonization is bad politics a waste of time why are we even discussing this that by the way is one of the most pernicious effects of in world today is rupert murdoch and and what he has meant in the public policy discussion no serious analysis at all so i want to ask you vj and i want to ask people here what would it mean does it is it sensible i i would love this my very naive view of this i'd like to see a map of the united states with the grid lines attached what new things need to be built where could they be built not as the only way to do it but here is a model of transformation where a congressperson would be able to look and say oh oh i see we're going to have wind here we need one new power line here according to this and we can tap so-and-so and 30 percent of our electricity is going to come from solar in the next state and 10 percent is going to come here and so forth is that feasible to actually articulate a more detailed engineering vision that isn't the only one but is one that shows okay here's a map given our resources of what make what might make sense so i'd like to open it to the floor and of of course get vj's comments first my quick reaction is first of all absolutely to me i want to just highlight that we are we have jim talked about california i want to just applaud new york city and new york state that our political leadership actually is asking for this so not every state has that luxury right and i think that to me and i'm i'm sure through the work of hds and there are many others this is you know we have amazing universities we only you know this is three phd students work over five years and a lot of states may have already done this so i think this to answer is yes this should be done it it requires painful sort of gathering of data proxy data utilities are not always kind of you know they've used sort of cyber security and privacy and you know all this is you know not disclosing some of that but i think it can be overcome i think it can be done but i think it's important to open the floor please and could you introduce yourself here comes a mic we'll have a roving mic please say who you are stand up meet your colleagues and and make a comment or ask a question hello yes i'm salim alee from the university of delaware and i wanted to offer that delaware has the institute for energy conversion which has been operating since 1972 and we would be very happy to help sds and especially because of our very unique location that we are close to of course not far from new york but also very close to other bordering states so from a policy perspective the trans boundary aspect would be very interesting to work on we also have a major investment in vehicle to grid technology and so we have a us department of energy center of excellence and some of these areas so we'd be very happy to work with especially our regional colleges and universities and greater philadelphia area sure and by the way delaware is very well known for that energy work your university so please paul thank you i'd like to connect this last presentation with the remarks jeff and others have made earlier i'm paul shavastava i'm the chief sustainability officer for penn state university and we are working very hard in the energy area we're probably among the top five universities in terms of number of publications on energy we have 450 energy researchers at the university and then i arrived a year ago i asked where is our energy transition plan and there was complete silence in the room we are also a state which has a one trillion cubic feet of natural gas under it and we are fracking central so my question is given that this network wants to prioritize a political discourse on sustainability issues particularly energy issues how do we take a set of 500 600 researchers with six major energy institutes within the university to focus on what would be to anybody in this room the primary question of energy transition not only do we not have a discourse on it we don't even have a language in science that could prioritize questions like this so i would like to connect the energy challenge to the the third priority that the the network mentioned one of making central the political action and and and what are the reward system limitation and barriers within university that prevent our very brilliant scientists from doing that thank you great thank you very much please neal leary from dickinson college is presentations this morning have been excellent i think these ideas of the kinds of transitions that were presented largely from an engineering kind of perspective are very useful we've been showing though what's feasible for a long time in one of the areas i think our network might be able to to add light to and this is an area i don't have much expertise in but the idea of how do we go from what's feasible to what can actually be implemented and we've talked about the absence of plans we also heard earlier that the language of the sdgs is non-partisan the word planning sadly is very partisan and so to what extent are we able to if like we identify offshore wind is something that would be necessary to make the kind of transition that was discussed how does that actually happen is FERC really driving plans as DOE is at state level is it the private sector maybe sort of sharing and understanding sort of who are the players who actually make these things happen because right now we don't really have a planning orientation in this country towards energy so far as i understand it can i have a one sentence response nobody knows this but on our electricity bill we pay a very small fraction of percent that is called the clean energy charge it's not called the carbon tax it collects 1.4 billion a year in new york state i'll just stop there i think my own sense is that first of all the u.s government certainly will not make such a plan during this administration that is absolutely not going to happen on the other hand we're going to hear from two congressmen who are saying we need a we need plans and we need help that is also a reality the government actually does not have planning capacity i don't think it's such a bad word in the public opinion it is in washington very oddly the the the lesson of winning the cold war was stop all thinking plans are evil therefore we don't think anymore and we've been in a non-thinking mode for i would say a quarter century in the formal sense that our institutions do not make these forward analyses that's been both kinds of administration at both parties and it is a fact of life i would posit from my experience that and from actually testing even surveying and focus groups and so forth the public wants to see a pathway what does it mean how could we do this what are you even talking about because this is not understood this language and the idea of climate change control at a soundbite level is i'm supposed to pay more for my electricity or i can't drive my car i can't get to work anymore it's so simplistic by design by the way because we're up against powerful interests we're not just up against sheer inertia it's both interests and design in capacity and accidental in capacity but i do think that this is where we need to put our efforts because when it is explain that it's not just a problem but there's a solution and life in that solution has a lot of desirable characteristics even beyond avoiding disaster which is one of them i think that the public response will be powerful so we're not going to crack by ourselves particular political problems in washington right now but we can lay a foundation for change through knowledge and that i would say is the theory of change that i would propound which is serious uh deep analysis i i'm just amazed when i listen to vj or jim god i've been doing this for 20 years and i don't know what i'm talking about because i could not have given that talk or even pointed out relevant parameters so i personally love to listen to engineers talk about this and i want to get the economists out of the way for a moment and let the engineers tell us what would be needed for the specs of such a system and then we can go back and calculate some of the costs and some of the transfers and some of the ways to protect vulnerable populations but it turns out the costs are not that high to begin with the solutions are pretty nifty and we need an engineering perspective for a lot of it but i would say and this is uh i would say it is not the case in my opinion that we've shown plan after plan and it just doesn't go anywhere we've hardly shown a specific plan anywhere and at the national level never we've never shown what a transition would look like but my dream is that you have if it were translated in political terms you'd be able to click on a congressional district and understand what does this mean for my district and a candidate or congressperson would be able to say this works for us in fact we've got lots of wind we've got lots of solar we're already on the grid this works in terms of our peaks in terms of our uh technologies and so on that we don't have in an operational way please microphone here oh sorry one here and then coming to you afterwards yeah exact same from barclays vj what would you like to see and what are your thoughts for where the investment the investment community comes in because i'd imagine that uh infrastructure energy investors would love to participate in opportunities like this and collaborate also with academia just a short answer to that i think it's important to and i didn't have time to go into this the issues of financing issues of risk and issues of long-term sort of transition that are buried into this which i think we really need the finance community to sit down and have that conversation together right because it will require massive investments over the next 30 years so so i think we should talk about it yeah what i would like the industry to do on a pre-commercial basis is to support the analytics because the investment opportunities will clearly be there and on a commercial basis they will be there but you can't invest without a plan and the kinds of solutions are only semi-market-based when you're talking about which grids which major energy reservoirs to tap that is a systems dynamics that is pre-market and some of it is not at all a market-based it's a it's a network that is has to be established as a matter of public policy then financing that becomes a proposition for the banks but the idea that this is just going to emerge out of market forces is not feasible you have to plan a grid you have to know what kinds of energy you're tapping into we have to decide what our trans boundary challenges are we don't have systems that are aligned right now even across states for regional markets much less across canada mexico us which is also relevant for much of this so i would like you to go back to the industry leaders and say come on let's put some resources into this pre-commercially to enable the universities to actually carry out the kind of detailed work and analysis that's needed to get this done because it cannot be simply floating bonds and financing this because we don't know what to do and we're paralyzed right now for a lot of reasons interests of course but also because there isn't a a build out that is understood except in a few places in the country i think over here yeah please stand up and introduce yourself i think it's on hi sorry hi i'm damian white uh rhodo island school of design i'm a little confused about this notion that there's not plans out there it seems to me that if you do a review of the literature there's you know there's there's a big field of plans now i would just take one example mark Jacobson at stanford has done some pretty detailed 50 state plans for 100% renewables over the last two three years which are at least sketching possibilities we've then got a second layer of that debate where the debate is around whether the focus should be on 100% renewables or 100% carbon free and then more recently obviously we might hear more about that this afternoon we're seeing the horizon of a green new deal being proposed which is explicitly trying to put a more programmatic turn in other quarters where the focus is not just on a kind of energy reductionist focus but energy is lead to jobs jobs to justice justice to racial social equity issues so so there's a lot out there and couldn't we think about this network in terms of connecting all those circles and having some you know robust debates as well about the the complexities of decarbonization and the politics that we need to do to get there yeah well we're going to connect with the green new deal champions this afternoon but they're looking for they're looking for an action agenda they are exactly allowing the lines of sustainable development for an integrated vision but it's a vision and the question of what is that implementation is not done by anybody there is no detailed programming so that's the sense in which things are are not in place Michael I don't know if you would say a few words at this juncture about about the legal structural changes that would be needed to implement because this is another dimension of the problem that's highly complex that also you're taking up in a pioneering way that has not been done up until now thank you Jeff I'm Michael Gerard I'm on the faculty of the law school here and director of the savings center for climate change law we took the pathways to deep decarbonization report that Jim Williams and others put together and asked the question how does us law need to change in order to be on that pathway us law at the federal and state and local levels and for the last three years we've been working on a project called legal pathways to deep decarbonization of the United States the leading to a book of about 1200 pages co-authored by 35 law professors and practitioners around the country they'll come out in March that will have more than a thousand specific recommendations on how do we achieve the goals in terms of efficiency and renewables and and electrification and so that is much of it is to be done at the state level and we now are going about to have 23 states with about 51 percent of the u.s. population in states with democratic governors so i think that in the next two years whereas not a lot is going to happen at the federal level other than coming up with things for hopefully the next administration a great deal as possible at the state level and so we'll be circulating information about how to how to get the deep legal pathways to deep decarbonization book to all of you and we hope that it'll give some very specific ideas on how to move forward in your own states i would say at the state level party does not play the same role that it plays at the national level either because it's not such a brutal divide with some governors it does but we'll see how that yeah we'll see how that turns out and we're we're also putting together a team of pro bono lawyers to do a lot of the legal drafting and legislative drafting and ordinance drafting and so forth necessary to implement these recommendations thank you okay so just one comment on first of all i think it was great that Jacobson spurred us all to think about 100 renewable but i think now has come a time that we should see all there are multiple entities and we need to get granular and i think a state or a region is a fantastic way to get that granularity where you need to worry about NYSERDA the ISO the con ads of the thing and all those constraints and i think they're both legal issues as well as how tariff reform will work that satisfies both the existing players and their importance as well as the new things is going to be very important so i think that starts to be pretty granular and i think we need to start to get down to that working with those agencies right from the get go so that's i want to say that that's what's also needed so not just academics but also work with the utilities work with your public service commissions work with your equivalent of NYSERDA and and and at the city's level as well i would have imagined also that building part of the physical infrastructure is a federal issue and a shared federal state issue on building out the new grid and where and those decisions have hardly even been explicitly addressed we've not had an infrastructure program anywhere that is based on the kind of underlying the energy transformation dynamics so that part has not been analyzed at all it does strike me that many of you probably could approach the governor's office in your state of whether there is this kind of transformation planning underway to get to zero which is even prudentially a state should do that even if they don't believe it they understand that that may become public policy soon enough because that is what is mandated actually of course if we're to meet global goals so for a state to say i don't believe it may not be sufficient to not do it in other words every state should have an analysis quickly they'll learn i'm not alone the neighbors make a big difference the region makes a big difference and also the underlying technology assumptions where our national discussion within this network can make a huge difference as well but i do think engaging with your state government on this issue and my guess is most states do not have such a planning process in place much less a specific idea of what transformation is going to be made california yes to a significant extent washington probably yes new york to some extent but it pretty quickly it goes down from there would be my guess i may be wrong but that would be my my assumption who else would like to join in at the moment please yeah cb hi i'm cb patacharia from the university of pittsburgh my question again relates to another stakeholder group which is the private sector so we heard about the utilities and the need to engage with the utilities but what about the companies that exist in these regions so i come from a region where we have you know us steel and and alcoa and several others with who are some of whom are on board but several of them are not how do we engage how does the network engage and get the buy-in from the corporates so that you know we can as well leverage their knowledge and expertise in this area i i think that's a very good point and you know in talking about new york city i kind of didn't highlight the importance of industry which is of course very important private industry and i you know what is interesting is that if you look at what happened in europe dong which is you know a big offshore wind installer for example changes name it's stood for danish oil and natural gas but nobody want they don't want anybody to know that anymore they go by dong as one word stat oil has changed its name so actually there are many legacy industrial players which are just as important to this transition and i think sort of seeing where they actually have equally a role to play there's going to be steel involved in all the stuff there's going to be aluminum involved there's going to be many things involved so yeah stat oil is equinoar now if you haven't heard so it's a sign of the times one last comment by clayton hey good morning professor i'm clayton louis ferrara i'm a biologist and the executive director of ideas for us i just wanted to share something that i think is an important element here uh my organization is based out of orlando and that's where we live orlando is fortunate enough to be now one of five cities in the entire country that's integrated the sdgs into our sustainability plan we need a lot more of that there's a lot of this work that's being done in many different silos and you almost have to build kind of an a team of an engineer a publicist a marketer someone who deals with politicians to kind of bring these groups together i think that it's really important that we understand that we need to play to each individual audience i look at why we're able to make so much headway in orlando compared to other cities some in florida in particular one of the reasons that's been brought up is that we have a very agreeable mayor but when it comes down to working with the people in the different departments and commissioners within that city you have to play to the audience tremendously so for many of the things that we've done we've brought in sociologists or people who deal with understanding political parties to be able to present this information in a way that's extremely uh you know at their level not asking them to stretch tremendously and understanding a bunch of climate science in order to see how something will drive economic development in their community and what this has led to is even with our municipality that we have o u c we've started a discussion of decommissioning the power plant and uh stopping a massive multimillion dollar loan that they were going to take out to update it and uh we brought in a coalition at that particular time but we did it with marketers and engineers and many many many different people at the table i think that there's a model that can be created from best practices to come into a city and to be able to turn key get them on the path to first adopt in the sdgs but then also integrating them into a lot of various things and i think that if we were to collectively work on something like that to kind of uh i hate the term dumb down the science but you've got don't use it yeah well you've got to be able to market it then right don't use that either okay so look good knowledge evidence-based and uh adult discussions that are serious on what we need to do yep good Clayton thank you very much and uh Orlando is indeed doing a lot of tremendous things i think for all of us in campuses we're in our city so engaging really should be a natural thing and engaging with the mayor first is not hard yeah you're by the way your institutions are uh probably the major employers in the city the major business of the city in most cases there's no difficulty in having the discussion of course the difficulty also is in having our institutions being effective counterparts and being able to to work on this yeah just just real quick there's also a great deal of magic that can happen when cities uh align with their university systems that are there in Orlando we're fortunate that we've got five colleges that are operating there since i last saw you in Rome we've had a sit-down meeting with all of them to have them begin measuring their collective impact as those colleges together then in tandem with the city as well in regards to the stgs and that's very powerful wonderful i just want to say one sentence the national science foundation wants exactly this and has created a program called the sustainability research networks for multiple universities to work with cities and come together so i'll i'll i'll say we should talk over coffee break and that is a good segue to coffee break thank you in we met him uh that's the focus here personally hi everyone i think we'll be starting in the next five minutes if you can find your way to your seat i'm you Hi everybody, we're going to get started in just a minute. Hi everybody, we're about to get started. Thank you for grabbing the coffee and taking your seat. Great, thank you guys. So did everybody get some caffeine? So I'm Jean Holm, I'm with the City of Los Angeles. How many people are here representing cities today? I've talked to some city people. How many people are here representing cities? A couple of brave hands. Okay, how many people are here representing universities or research organizations? Wow, okay. So how many of you live in cities? Alright, awesome. And how many of you have a smartphone or have ever used a computer? Alright, so this is the session for you. Alright, so we're talking about smart cities or connected cities. We're talking about ICT and how technologies can make a connection. And we're hoping this is going to be a super engaging, lively discussion. Alright, so Bill and I are going to talk a little bit about what we're kind of doing and give some context. Sanjeev had a family emergency and can't be here today, but he and I work very closely together, and so I've got some of his slides and we'll represent his work. And so if you want to challenge us, I didn't ask him, Bill, if this is okay. If you want to challenge us, just like raise your hand and interrupt us. We'll have lots of time for discussion at the end as well. So let's start with Bill. Well, thanks to Jeff and the organizers for inviting me. My name is Bill Sellecki. I'm a professor of geography here at the City University of New York, Hunter College. And as was sort of mentioned, I've been doing sort of a lot of work sort of connected to this issue of sustainable cities. I was just a 10 second sort of background just to sort of give you a sense of who's in front of you. I was the co-founder of something, a founder, however you want to say it, of something called the Institute for Sustainable Cities. And we sort of operated it and continued to do so, sort of looking at this question of how to integrate sustainable practice into the context of cities. This is something we've been going on for about 10 years. The other sort of major threat of my work, in fact, some of which I'll reflect on now, is specifically on climate change in cities. And a lot of that work is with a co-researcher, Cynthia Rosenzweig, who's also connected here with Columbia. And actually it's in this building where some of the early work, we've been about more than 20 years ago, we were asked to sort of put together an assessment of climate change impacts on cities, particularly the New York metropolitan region. We had some of the closing events on campus. And then literally about 10 years or so ago, we founded something called the Urban Climate Change Research Network in like downstairs in one room over. And the other thing that we sort of like to sort of connect with is that one of my other hats is I'm the co-chair of the New York City panel on climate change. So we provide the City of New York with in-depth information about climate change with respect to the city. And we've been doing that over a series of reports over the past 10 years. One of the things that we also like to sort of put our little cap on is that while Michael Bloomberg, when mayor, took on the mantle of climate change specifically for mitigation sometime around 2005, 2006, we and our work and our collective work really encouraged him to sort of get engaged in the question of adaptation as well. And that in some ways sort of fostered the development of the New York City panel on climate change. So that's sort of, you know, some of the things that we bring together, a lot of very explicit sort of connection between the university work and community and city. And shifting back for a moment to my work with the Institute for Sustainable Cities, one of the things that I recognize, and this is why I'm really excited to be here today, is this issue of the role and power and capacity of cities to be transformative. I mean all of you, as you just saw, you know, or maybe most of you live in cities, but of course cities, you know, as part of their history have overcome challenges. That's basically the definition of the city existing today. My colleague here from Los Angeles, I mean Los Angeles Basin has approximately water available naturally for maybe 100,000 people. They're now in Southern California. There's about 20 million or so. So something has happened. Something has sort of created a possibility of sustaining that population. Now whether or not those issues are quote-unquote sustainable in terms of water supply, conveyance, etc. That's another sort of fundamental question. But the idea that cities have met challenges and overcome them and continue to thrive is sort of something that I look toward in the context of the sustainable development challenge today as well as the sort of more specific question on sustainability, on climate change. So one of the things that sort of struck me just as an intro comment, there are a couple of things that have always sort of guided my thinking. One is this issue of, you know, we heard about this previously about the context of planning. And while we recognize that that's always complicated in the context of the United States and sort of the issue of developing plans and implementing them, you know, that's always a challenge. But I think one of the things we keep in mind for cities is that we can see other examples of places that have in other contexts where transformative planning has been put into place and changed the daily life of those locations. And I'm specifically talking about rural America. And one of the things that guided my thinking in the early days of some of the work at the Institute was how do we borrow some of the elements of the extension service and the land grant institution tradition in the great colleges and universities of the country and translate that to activities and operations within cities. I mean, and of course we know many of you from states where those extension services dramatically transformed the everyday life of city and of rural areas and accelerated the process of integration of new technologies such as smart technologies that are equivalent in the early 20th century into rural America. Electrification, agricultural practice, hydrologic transformations, all these things that we are familiar with. So one of the things that I was particularly sort of driven by is how do you telescope that process and accelerate it in the context of cities? We've tried to do that in the context of the Institute. I know many of the other institutions and sort of centers, et cetera, that are represented here have done that as well. So that's I think sort of this really interesting charge for this group and the SDN activities at large. Now, with all that as a brief intro, I know I've probably already used up many of my minutes. I don't know what else to say. One of my other sort of requests that were brought to me was to sort of talk a little bit in the broader context about the 1.5 report. I was a co-author on that. I also was a co-author on the just recently released national climate assessment, the one the Black Friday report, which I like as a sort of a moniker for it, that came out last week. So there's a tremendous amount of knowledge that's now available to understand some of these questions. Of course, there's also the soccer report, which was the quiet report that also came out on Black Friday, not just the NCA4, but also this national or sort of continental scale evaluation of the carbon conditions for the region. So what I want to do in that context is just sort of thumb through a few things from the 1.5 report. I think it's relevant to the SDGs because in truth, the articulation of the 1.5 report is closely connected to the SDGs and having just lived through, experienced, suffered through many, many, many IPCC meetings regarding this, SDGs and their importance were translated into the report and then I think become a good vehicle for picking up some of that discussion. So we have the report, a very colorful cover. It was released last month, of course, and now has become one of the issues of debate in Katowice where they're breathing in lots of coal smoke and eating lots of beef from what I saw on the news today. But nonetheless, some of the challenges that are embedded in our work and this is actually the title of the report and why do I put this in? One, it's like the world's longest title of a report but also it actually illustrates the ambition of this whole project because it's not just keeping temperatures, global warming temperatures below 2 degrees C toward 1.5, but also it tries to sort of create a mechanism through a set of pathways to not only achieve that but also to engage with sustainable development, SDGs, and as well, of course, let's also eradicate poverty. So a small remit but that's its title. So what has the report said? There are sort of four major takeaways and some of this you've probably already seen so I'm going to quickly jot over and maybe in the Q and A I'll come back to as needed. We know that climate change is impacting the world. Clearly there are clear benefits to sort of keep below 2 and then toward 1.5 and that these last two are particularly relevant for this discussion in cities. One is that it's challenging but it is possible and the term we've used is feasible and one of the things we wanted to highlight here is that, and we've already heard it a little bit, the technology is present in many cases to achieve these goals, to implement issues but the other thing is that the institutions, the social norms, financing are some of the highest barriers. At least that's what the assessment report noted and of course very strongly is this link to these SDG goals and of course there's a full assessment of that in the report. I'll just sort of toggle through this a little bit. We're at 1°C, we're sort of galloping toward 1.5 probably somewhere in the range of the early 2040s. Now again, why is that relevant? Of course because the SDGs in their context are basically sort of running along a parallel path and of course within the context of that cities are especially important because we know almost all of the population growth in the globe during that time either through the SDG time period or toward 1.5 are going to be in cities. Almost all that population growth that we're going to be experiencing much of it in low and moderate income countries for sure but we'll see increasing sort of population growth certainly urban population growth in the US as well. So these are just some of the context questions and what does this sort of mean for some of the questions of carbon emissions and again going back to this issue of smart cities and interconnectedness. What we basically need to do is accelerate, dramatically accelerate the process of decarbonization. We've heard this already but it is really in this next 10 years and of course in this next 20 years where we need to sort of dramatically launch a whole set of initiatives and the capacity of using smart technologies is going to be one of the vehicles to achieve that. Oops, I'm sorry, moving too fast here. So this range of technologies again embedded in the report and there's too much just maybe in the Q&A I can highlight some of these things but in chapter 4 particularly there is a kind of a clear articulation of some of these capacities of using new and emerging technologies and the idea of smart technologies which in some ways I think we see sort of entering into a second generation. Obviously a lot of these technologies and the idea of a smart city has been at least present in literature for 10 or 15 years. Some of the failings or limitations of those approaches have been recognized but one of the things in the assessment report really highlighted some of the opportunities to sort of move on from some of those questions and integrate some of the new and emerging perspectives. And we have a broad set of impacts that potentially could be taken place and of course in the context of cities we see some of these issues sort of playing out very specifically whether it's sort of the issue of specific change in energy mix but also the role of the connection between cities and rural areas but in some cases some of the carbon emissions practices will be very relevant in rural areas and so some of the city solutions are going to be played out in the rural context as well. I'm getting the note that we're sort of moving toward the end of time in terms of my own few minutes here. I just wanted to sort of end off with just as a further kind of lean toward this question of smart cities. In the context of the report there was really the issue of climate resilient development pathways and that was sort of the broader rubric and one of the things that came out in the report specifically to the question of cities and more particularly to the issue of technologies and in this case smart technologies that we need to sort of think about ways of accelerating this process of learning particularly in the post-event context. I mean many of you are in cities that have experienced droughts or strong storms, unprecedented events. A lot of the literature sort of seems to illustrate that those are key events for learning and engaging not just in adaptation strategies but also new questions of climate emissions reduction and mitigation. Also within this all the practices need to sort of engage I mean a lot of the smart technologies initially were thought of as top-down. I think we see a second generation more bottom-up, more citizen science, more community instrumentation and sensing. It's in that context where a lot of the more effective efforts have emerged in terms of community engagement and also sort of dealing with sort of disempowered populations as well. So that's a huge issue and a lot of the work that we do is in the city and other locations. It has to connect to the everyday and the life conditions and the neighborhood conditions of the residents. I think the other sort of closing point which is obvious in some ways is obvious from this discussion is that there's a lot of knowledge capacity that is emerging and there's things like C40, the Urban Climate Change Research Network, many others, SDSN and I think it's in accelerating that through multiple partnerships in each city that the vehicle for change seems to be most significant. So with that, I think I'm just going to close. Again, what I tried to do is sort of couch some of these intro comments with respect to the 1.5 challenge and some of the technological issues that sort of start to emerge from that discussion, but I know Gene is going to sort of pick up that very specifically. Thank you so much. Great. Thanks, Bill. So just to give you a quick context, I've worked in and around the government for 35 years. I spent 32 of those at NASA, another five with the White House with the Obama Administration as the evangelist, the only person in the federal government that title, evangelist for data.gov and open data initiatives. So hopefully you've downloaded some of our data. And then I spent a few years with the World Bank working throughout Central Africa, Russian, India on open data initiatives. Now I'm in the amazing city of Los Angeles, my hometown working for the best mayor in the country. There's a throwdown. Eric Garcetti is a visionary and has been very supportive of our work around the SDGs. So LA, like Orlando, has adopted... Yeah. Has adopted SDGs as a framework for how we can better manage our city. We do this in conjunction with some very generous support from the Hilton Foundation and the mayor's office. We have a mayor's fund as well. And Sanjeev Kagram, who couldn't be here today, was representing Occidental College and is now in Arizona, and is in the state university. So I just want to kind of call out those partnerships. And so what are we doing in Los Angeles that makes us even want to consider the SDGs at a subnational level? And I think this is really important. So we are really working towards being a smart city. Not that we were a dumb city before, but we want to be a smarter city. And really this for us means connections amongst all of our Angelenos, particularly as we think about the future of technology around autonomous vehicles. They're here today. Autonomous flying vehicles. We will be testing them at the end of next year in Los Angeles. So Uber Air and Elevate are coming to LA. Robotics and a whole variety of technologies. And really our focus, as some of the others have said, is really around equity. So what makes it different than any other technology initiative is we are looking at how to connect the most impoverished county in the country. So once you factor in the fact that housing is incredibly expensive in Los Angeles, we are poorer than any other county. Housing costs often 50% of somebody's income. And so when you factor that in, as well as other issues and transportation costs, suddenly you have a lot of people who are on the verge of homelessness or becoming homeless. And so how do we think differently when as a city, like we don't control poverty or hunger, like those are at different governmental levels, but as a city we have a responsibility to help people have a better quality of life. So we are using a ton of technologies. I'm not going to talk about all of these. Everything from gamification, which is a pretty cool set of technologies we're using with Riot and Blizzard Games. I'm a gamer. So I'm just going to put it right out there. So if you're other gamers, we can talk about World of Warcraft in the back. But gamification is a great way to connect with young people about issues going on in the city and to gather data. So we're doing gamification around climate change, actually. So we're about to launch Agents of Climate where kids can go and using virtual reality and augmented reality in the city parks, capture different kinds of creatures, identify different kinds of plants, and also take temperature readings. So starting to get that awareness built into the next generation of our citizen scientists. And then, of course, machine learning and Internet of Things and all these other aspects. So I don't know about you guys, but I never have, like, people at the organization that know all these things. And so we created... So this is kind of my normal day-to-day, right? So no budget. You can't hire anybody. All my city staff has older skills. I'm a younger... I'm 57. And I'm younger than the average age of the city. So that's not a good place to be. And our outcome is we have to change the world. So other than that, all's good. So what I did is, in addition to the other stuff, I've been a professor at UCLA for 20 years. And my students had other challenges. So how do... And maybe you guys can relate to some of this. How do you get students who are working on projects to have access to real data? How do you let them feel empowered that their experiences in the classroom will make a difference in the world around them? How can you make sure that they're coming out with the skills employers want? And how do you make sure that they're engaged in the classroom? Okay, so I don't know if you relate to any of those. But that's like my life day to day at UCLA. Either at UCLA or I also teach in China for the university. And so what I did is when I came to the city a couple years ago, I said, I'm going to fix two problems at once. I'm going to fix that zero budget, no city skills problem. And I'm going to fix the problem where students out in the universities don't have access to data and they don't know a pathway. And there was a third problem which is we have 48,000 employees at the city of Los Angeles. And as part of that, 20,000 are retiring in the next five years because they're all older than me. So we need to hire. And so I wanted our students coming out of the universities locally to stay in Los Angeles, come work for the city, or at least be more informed about city data issues. So I created the Data Science Federation with 17 local universities. We serve not only the needs of the city of Los Angeles, but the 88 other Southern California cities. We are open to partnering with other cities around the country as well. We host students from a lot of different places. In fact, shout out to University of Chicago. We host the University of Chicago student here as part of our Data Science Federation working on a homelessness project. We are open to lots of partnerships. And the way we do this is we create data sharing agreements and intellectual property agreements and do all those stupid legal stuff, sorry, important legal stuff up front. And then we can go full bore with all the professors at the university across multiple departments who are interested in doing research around issues that are important to the city but we don't know how to solve. And again, we've opened this up just recently through the Southern California Association of Governments to 88 other cities. And so the kinds of challenges that we look at are smart city technologies. We're doing an earthquake early warning app. This is my life right now because it rolls out in four weeks. So you'll be able to download an app that will tell you an earthquake is happening before you feel it and help you get to be safe. If you want it, let me know. Or look in the app store on December 31st because I said by the end of the year. We work on homelessness issues predicting who is at risk of homelessness to stop it before it starts. That was the University of Chicago student and a partnership with UCLA's California Policy Lab and USC's Homeless Policy Research Institute. And then we're looking at more tactical things like access to housing and how to make it affordable, how to make sure people's housing rights are protected, and then making sure we do all sorts of really cool stuff like cannabis regulations are bringing in a huge amount of new revenue to the city. So how do we make sure that we're, you know, managing these new opportunities in really good ways? So our students do tons of stuff, but we also have an amazing civic hacking community which many of you guys also do. And so we work with our Hack4LA, which is our local Code for America organization. And we bring in all sorts of people to work on these challenges as well. And this group meets twice a week, two nights a week across the city and really looks at interesting projects. And so one of the major areas we wanted to get all of these young people looking with a different perspective is at the Sustainable Developmental. So we have focused for the last year a whole cohort of students from multiple universities to look at these challenges. And so I'm just going to talk about a couple of things briefly. So first is around SDG1, around poverty. So the city doesn't actually fund issues around poverty. Like we don't really have control over poverty. It's a county organized set of initiatives, but that doesn't mean we don't have the responsibility or that there's things we can contribute to help to measure whether or not we're being effective. So we, as I said, live an incredibly impoverished space even though we also have some of the richest people in the world in Los Angeles. So it's this dichotomy between the Kardashians and the people living on the streets. And then like in South LA, which is one of our most impoverished areas of the city, this is an area where 82% of families struggle just to get by. And so in that community, for example, only 50% of the homes have internet access at home because it's just not, like it's not affordable. Like $15 a month is simply not affordable as an option. And yet think about all the opportunities they could have if they could get job training and access. So we're working actually with a 5G initiative where the first 5G city on the planet. And as part of that, all of our telecommunication companies have to build out in our low-income neighborhoods affordably and as fast as anywhere else in the city. And so what are we doing? Well, we're looking at, as to how the students look at all of the SDGs, we ask them to tell us, what are we doing well and what do we have to improve and how could we do that in a different way? And so this is something we've never thought about before at the city. I know, it's a little crazy. But the reason we haven't thought about it is because we don't have the authority or the budget for it. And so the SDGs give us this framework to think differently about it. And the partnerships with the universities, the Data Science Federation, allow us to bring in tons of new ideas. And these students, of course, aren't just people who currently live in Los Angeles, but they're students who come from lots of different countries. And so we are getting an amazing perspective across the SDGs and how we can think differently about them and how we can hold ourselves accountable for things that we maybe haven't in the past. In a different way, because of partnerships with organizations like all of yours. And then we also looked at the issues around gender equity. So we have some amazing things that the mayor has done. 50% of our commissioners, those are appointed people. Our women, 52% of our general managers, those are the people who really run the city. Our women, including for our airport and port and transportation. And yet we find that when we looked at our budget, we don't have funding for gender programs. So kind of where your money, put your money where your mouth is, we realized that there's more things we can do. And for LA, the way we ended up localizing this SDG was the fact that for us, the LGBTQIA community is super important. It's a big part of why Los Angeles feels that we're representative of a diverse community. And so for us, gender becomes a spectrum. It's not a binary. And that means that as we look at the indicators, for us, we want to localize those in a way that makes contextual sense for our community. And then I'm just going to briefly mention that we also did a ton around sustainable communities and then climate action. But I think Bill kind of spoke to some of that. But again, like many of you live in a city where there's a sustainability officer or a sustainability plan or some other activity. So we actually mapped back and forth between all of these plans that get published and not really sure what happens with some of the plans. Some of the plans are great. Some of the plans are not so great. And so what we did is we mapped all of those things we said we were going to do back to the SDGs. And then we looked at what other cities we're doing. So San Francisco, New York, Boston, lots of folks have been doing amazing work in this area. And so we've tried to learn from them and SDSN has been super helpful in making sure that we get connected to them as well as some of the other networks we're part of. And so I just want to kind of mention that as a result, this partnership of universities and cities with a focus on the SDGs has really transformed the kind of things that we look at and the way we prioritize our policies and the way we look at sometimes favored programs like, oh, everybody loves this program, but it doesn't really have good outcomes. So sometimes things that are spoken about in a qualitative way, once you put some quantitative data behind it, it doesn't really pay off. And there are other ways you can make investments or partnerships that make a bigger difference for the people who live in and around your city. And so we actually have a dashboard. This is a major dashboard that we portray some of the work on the SDGs. So we can tell if we're red, yellow, green, we try to be very transparent and open about this. And then the last thing was really like, how do we make this sustainable? Because lots of people get up at conferences like this and they talk about what they're going to do and then they don't do it. Or they leave and then it doesn't happen. And so the way we did that is we had a huge motivator is we had the Olympics coming in 2028, which coincidentally is just before the 2030 goals. So all of the city departments are highly motivated to be able to actually do something for the Olympics. And as a result, we are using that as a way of connecting the SDGs in a sustainable way to actually build stuff out. So it's been a great partnership and it has universities with the cities. I'm open to hearing about anybody who wants to be part of our Data Science Federation or learn from it and do your own Data Science Federation. And just thanks to all the research and work going on at the universities. So do you want to get any questions? We're going to move to the next panel, which is Health, Nutrition and Well-Being. So can I ask our next presenters to come up and we'll get them introduced. Yeah, yes, of course. Good morning. I'm happy to be here. I'm Ron Redliner and I'm at Columbia University where I'm not related to this talk, but run the National Center for Disaster Preparedness and a small program called the Program on Child Well-Being and Resilience. And the crew asked me to come and talk to you about the SDGs in relationship to one of the more important goals, although I feel overwhelmed by the climate and energy stuff and a little guilty that I'm not working on that, I'm working on healthcare. And I want to present our sense of what we mean by healthcare and why it is a relevant topic and a very important topic for literally the well-being of Americans. And I'm going to try to cover some basic points. We only have 10 or 12 minutes per speaker and then there's going to be two other speakers and then we'll do Q&A. First of all, I want to make sure that we are all talking about the same thing and one of the things that has impressed me over the years of doing a lot of work on healthcare, especially for underserved populations, is that we are very, very definitionally challenged and I'm going to talk to you about what that actually means because we don't actually know how to define healthcare, nor do we know how to define access to healthcare and that's a real problem if we're trying to design policies to address this big problem. So I'm going to try to put us on common ground and then conclude with some comments about the role of the university, universities individually, universities and consortiums to deal with some of these problems on this other topic out here. I'm also then going to introduce you. I'm going to tell you about them very quickly right now and then they're going to come up and speak shortly. First of all, after me is Shawna Downs, who's a very interesting food systems researcher. She's going to talk about nutrition, not in terms of what should be in your diet, but what are the systems that make sure that good and nutritious food products go from wherever they came from onto your kitchen table. And this is a really important part of the nutritional conundrum and challenge that we actually don't talk about enough and Shawna will. She's a food systems researcher at the Rutgers School of Public Health and we'll hear from Shawna shortly. And then possibly one of the more interesting titled individuals that I have encountered in many years will be Alejandro Adler. He directs the international education at the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania. Just an absolutely fascinating, evocative, provocative title and Alejandro is going to talk to us about how to integrate the principles of positive psychology into the curriculum of universities and I'm looking forward to that talk as well. So let me dive into healthcare. We'll go on a quick trip here and see if we can figure out what we need to do. First of all, some common data. The documents, the books, the reports that Jeff and others have been talking about are available. They're extraordinary, I must say, filled with data, but just a couple of quick slides to make sure that we're coming from the same place on this. First of all, as Jeff mentioned earlier, this mind-blowing decline of life expectancy in the United States is something we really need to pay attention to. Why that has happened? What are all the factors? Is it partly the opium epidemic? Is it partly a sustained level of poverty around the country, et cetera? That's for other discussions to deal with, but we're just here to say that we have a remarkable drop in life expectancy. Very unfortunate. Secondly, the projected expenditures on health care in the United States will by 2020. I don't see how this is going to be stopped, but maybe it will be. It's going to approach literally 20% of the GDP of the U.S. an insane number that is really virtually unaffordable and an economic time bomb if you ever wanted to see one. Thirdly, the rate of people uninsured, the percentage of people uninsured in America is going back up. The Affordable Care Act in 2009, just beyond the left perimeter of the graph here, we had to get settled into the Affordable Care Act and then Medicaid expansion has resulted, did result in a very significant drop in the number of uninsured Americans. Where that's beginning to climb back up again, and there's a lot of reasons for that. I'm not going to have time to dwell on that, but that's the third point. The other point is that one of the things I'm very interested in is this nexus between insurance and the financing of health care and the actual delivery of health care. Your access to health care. So if you stop by one of the emergency rooms, even in our spectacular health centers here in New York or anywhere around the country, in most ERs, you will see this. You'll see it right now. You'll see it in the middle of the night. It'll be twice as bad as this on the weekends. It is a reflection of a major problem in what other kinds of services people have access to. So I'm going to talk a bit about access, and one of the things that you should be aware of in case you're not, is a federal designation called Health Professional Shortage Areas. Those that work in this field, we familiarly call them HIPSSs. But HIPSSs cover huge resources of the United States. So for primary care, a HIPSSa is a geographic area where there's less than one primary care doctor for 3,000 people. And if you look at the map of the U.S., the spread of HIPSSs around the United States is startling, it's dramatic, and it's not easily fixable. And here's another aspect of this, is that the level of HIPSSs and the relationship of providers to patient population is extremely variable. So this is a really crazy reality. So if you live on the border of a state that's got really good distribution of physicians and availability, relatively speaking, that's fine, but you may go 10 miles across the border and then you're in a state that has absolutely lousy distribution and availability of doctors. If you can't solve healthcare, we don't pay attention to the reality of where the providers are. And this is one of the things that's extremely localized on a state level, so it becomes an agenda for universities in states that do have serious problems with provider shortages and it presents an agenda that is politically salient in those states. Many other things, one other point I just want to make is this, the lack of transportation can be a barrier or lack of transportation, a barrier to healthcare. In a couple of surveys that we did over the years, this is just one of the studies, a lack of adequate transportation cited as a barrier to healthcare in 37 of the 50 states. It's really extraordinary and it's one of the things that lends itself to analysis and advocacy by universities. So here's the definition of challenges. We all want access to healthcare that's affordable, which of course suggests three questions. What are we even by access? What is healthcare and what actually is affordable? And let me talk to you about it in this way. So if you ask your mom what access to healthcare is, she, like my mom, would say, well, can I get the doctor on the phone, get an appointment this afternoon and maybe I'll get a house call. My mother used to think that. What healthcare meant to my mom and maybe yours too is sort of a rambling, random medical history conducted by a very friendly doctor and somehow culminating in prescription and you're done. And affordable to my mother was, she'll know once she sees it, but you should also be aware of the fact that at least 600,000 bankruptcies in the United States family bankruptcies are associated with unaffordable medical bills that simply cannot be paid, which is a really horrible thing. Ask a politician what's access while having health insurance. Well, okay. And what's healthcare? Well, whatever. Go to the emergency room. And literally I've had conversations with political leaders who should know better who actually have this point of view. And if you talk to them about affordable healthcare, it's what? What is that? What do you mean? And this engenders all kinds of conversations and situations to deal with on the political level. If you ask a modern doctor what's access, it really is about getting the patient and the provider in the same place at the same time and the right time. So I'm going to now hit this button and I'm going to show you what a modern doctor or provider or citizen really wants when they say healthcare. It's comprehensive, family-centered, system-based affordable services that include screening, prevention, acute and chronic disease management, access to primary and subspecialties providers as well as needed ancillary services, et cetera. What some of us in the field are calling medical home. And this getting there is what we want. How we get there to this definition, this standard of care, which we should have for every human being in the United States is a real challenge. Affordable, is that a medical term? Because none of my colleagues would think that it even remotely is something that they need to think about, unfortunately. So the essential point here, I'm going to conclude this shortly, is this is the take-home here. An insurance card does not equal access to quality healthcare. And this is something that has to be pride-loose from the minds of political leaders who think, oh, I got you insurance, if I did, and now let's move on to another topic. And that we can't have that. So let me conclude with talking specifically about some potential roles for universities in meeting some of the challenges I've talked about. First of all, there's the obvious. There's new technologies, artificial intelligence, how do those new perspectives, new sciences, new technologies help create and provide access to the appropriate kind of healthcare. Universities can help put out the word that we want all of healthcare to be focused on evidence and science and public health. I'm a very big fan of universities having public health courses and majors at the undergraduate level. Really important and can really make a difference. If it was up to me, I would not let anyone into medical school without a public health background. It's too critical and it's too important to understand even if you're in a private practice in a suburb doing cardiology, understanding the context from a public health point of view is absolutely critical. There's lots to learn and teach about what's called the social determinants of health and well-being, which I can't really go into now. Universities can incentivize a lot of cross-disciplinary collaboration and I think that's important for students to experience so that when they become faculty members, they go into the professions, they've already been trained to appreciate and use interdisciplinary collaboration. And finally, I think the universities as think tanks relative to some of these problems is an incredibly important role. What is it that the universities can come up with to solve the physician maldistribution problems? How do we instill social values and advocacy among the people that are going to be helping us overcome policy? And this is the promise of last slide. So the biggest, in my view, SDG, USA, impact of universities, especially in healthcare, is teaching to an extended student body. The walls have to come down between you and the outside world. So I'm suggesting that your new sense of your student body responsibilities include the public, includes media, and includes the political system. So how do we get from where we are now to not only talking about it, but instilling a sense of responsibility to the community? You teach. Yes, you should. That's what your role is. But I'm saying, let's kind of think about how wide and deep we can go outside our own campuses. So I'm going to leave it at that. And Sean, would you come up and chat with us? Is someone going to put my slides up? So I'm going to talk about nutrition and food and why it matters in the U.S. context when we're thinking about the SDG. So even though when we think about SDG, too, which is about hunger, but also about nutrition and sustainable agriculture, we often think about South Asia or sub-Saharan Africa. But when we're thinking about food insecurity, there's actually still really high rates of food insecurity in the U.S. and the United States and Latin America are food insecure in 2017. And when you think of households that have children, that number is even higher. And if you think about specific cities, for example, that number is higher. So Baltimore is an example. Almost a quarter of the population is food insecure. At the same time, when we think about overweight and obesity, and part of SDG, too, is actually looking at childhood obesity. So childhood overweight, I should say, under five. In the U.S., about 14% of children that are two to five years old are obese. When you look at the data for children that are 10 to 17, that gets even higher. And most states have overweight or obesity rates of over 25%. And actually, if you were to go back to the previous slide, you can pretty much overlay the overweight and obesity, and you see similar trends. So the places that have the highest rates of food insecurity also have really high rates of overweight and obesity. And when we think about SDG3, thinking about health and well-being, diets are really important in terms of the risk factors for disease in the U.S. Actually around the world, dietary risk factors or poor diets are the number one contributor to the global burden of disease. And in the U.S., we see high body mass index, so overweight and obesity, which is very much diet related, as the number one cause. And dietary risk factors are number three. So those are on the rise, whereas tobacco is actually on the decline when we're thinking about what is driving morbidity and mortality in the U.S. So the situation isn't great. And when we look at diets, so this slide is looking at the foods that we should be eating or not be eating and where we stand at the moment. For the foods that we should be consuming more of, we're not eating enough of those foods. When you think about nutrients that we should be avoiding, so on the bottom there, you have added sugar, saturated fat, and sodium. We tend to be consuming too much of those foods. So our diets aren't good, and there's many, many reasons for this. And I think why I do food systems research is because there are so many underlying drivers that are leading to this. This isn't a matter of people not knowing that they should eat fruits and vegetables. It's a matter of affordability. It's a process of inequality. So when we're thinking about SDG2 or nutrition and food, we need to think a lot more broadly. And think beyond SDG2 when we're talking about food. So for example, looking at food waste as one example. This is from the U.S. This is millions of metric tons, and you can see approximately one-third of food in the U.S. and worldwide actually is wasted. And when you look at which foods are more likely to be wasted, it tends to be a lot of time the more healthy foods. So fruits and vegetables as an example. And that's being wasted mostly at the consumer level, which is in the green part of the bars. In terms of diets, when you look at which food is being wasted, we're actually losing a lot of nutrients. So these graphs are looking at the percentage on the left, the percentage of the U.S. adult population that is not getting the nutrients they need based on food that is being wasted. So if that food wasn't being wasted, they would be able to meet their dietary recommendations in many cases. And then if you think about SDG13 and think about climate and the carbon footprint of the diets that we're eating, it becomes very clear that something needs to be done. We need to shift our diets, not just in terms of health, but also in terms of the environment. This slide is looking at different food groups. On the far right, we have beef. And it's looking at land use. Land use in the green, in the blue, water. And the orange is greenhouse gas emissions. And you can see beef is off the charts when we're looking at the environmental footprint. About a third of greenhouse gas emissions come from agricultural production where food moves along the value chain. And as Americans, we're consuming a lot of meat. Over, I think it's around 200 pounds of meat per year is the average American consumption. And that's driving huge carbon footprint. So this is something that needs to shift in terms of what we're eating. And when we're thinking about nutrition and what the role of the SDGs are, there tends to be obviously the focus on SDG2 and SDG3, which are highlighted here in this slide. But really, if you want to improve diets and you want to improve nutrition and health outcomes, all of the SDGs need to be addressed. And this figure is actually looking how every single one of the SDGs can influence nutrition. So if we think of sanitation and hygiene as an example, that's a huge issue in terms of nutrition in many parts of the world, where there's not access to clean water. But if you think of the US, there are pockets of the population that still have limited access to safe water. Just as one example, if we think of poverty, people often aren't able to buy the nutritious foods. As I mentioned before, it's not just a matter of not knowing what to eat or what might be healthy. It's a matter of being able to afford those foods. And so if we don't address the broader issues of the system and the misalignment of incentives in the food system that make some of these unhealthy foods more affordable, that drive consumers to demand those products through advertising, if we don't address those issues, we won't actually fix the food system in the US. So I'm going to just end off what might be the role of universities. And this is just really to instigate discussion, but we can go a lot further on these points. In terms of education, I think it's really important to teach students about the complexities and the challenges related to the food systems or issues related to SDG2 or SDG3 and to really teach them to work across disciplines to identify solutions that might be outside of the box or outside of the disciplinary box. Kind of aligned to what President Bullinger was saying earlier in the day, we really need to get students to be thinking about these problems from a cross-disciplinary perspective. Same goes for research. So as I'm trained as a nutritionist, then went into public health and now do work in the food system. And so I'm constantly trying to find across my universities where are the people in climate science that are interested in food. In agriculture who are interested in the food system and trying to work across the universities and across disciplines, but that becomes very difficult in a lot of universities because they're quite siloed. So that's something that's really important to think about. And then lastly in terms of practice, kind of aligned in terms of what Irwin said, getting students to expand their experience is really important. And from a nutrition and food perspective, I think having opportunities for field work is really important so that people understand the complexities of the food system and understand that it's not just going to be one easy fix and that there's going to have to be policies in programming all the way from agricultural production through to processing distribution and down to the consumer level in order to really address the challenges that the US food system faces. So I think I'll end off there and I look forward to the discussion. Good afternoon everyone. It's funny that I'm about to tell you a little bit about happiness and well-being when I'm the last guy between a large group of people with particularly large-sized brains, high-calorie consumption brains, and lunch, not particularly the happiest place to be. And I'll take the great compliment that Irwin paid me about the fascinating title I had until a month ago. And even though I no longer have that title and I'm proudly now at both Columbia and SDSN hoping to bridge research and practice, I hope the presentation I'm giving you today is still fascinating and more specifically, I'm going to talk about how research, if it is to have an impact on policy and ultimately practice, can and should be translated and packaged as number one, fun, two, attractive, and three, relevant. And this is really hacking into what we know about psychological science and what the title is, which is behavior change. Even though we know the SDGs, the research side of it is interdisciplinary, the implementation policy side of it is intersectorial, it's a systems-based research metrics and implementation. Behavior change, I'm going to strongly argue, is the biggest contributor towards the SDGs at the individual and social level. And achieving, or at least approximating, the SDGs has empirically been showed to contribute to healthy, happy well-being in people's lives. So the corporate world has definitely realized that we're evolutionarily hardwired to what Confucius Sarasota said 2,500 and 3,000 years ago, which is we, the human condition is to avoid suffering and seek happiness and well-being. And that's why Coca-Cola with an open happiness marketing campaign was tremendously successful in selling us stuff that we often don't need or want and contributing, in this case, to a growing obesity crisis around the world. So what I'm going to argue is that we can use the same psychological mechanisms that the corporate world has definitely hacked in making people consume things that are not good for them, that they're good for GDP, to actually achieve the SDGs via research and evidence-based policy. So moving on to well-being, we've now, luckily in the world of positive psychology and well-being science, developed the psychometric tools to answer what is well-being. It's no longer only a philosophical Aristotelian question. We can now empirically answer that well-being is multi-dimensional. And when I'm with my research colleagues and we see a factor analysis with five different samples, that is 18 different items, we get very, very excited. We ask people in Bhutan, India, the U.S., what is it that you pursue as an end in and of itself? We have things like positive affect and happiness, engagement, belonging, meaning, purpose. But this, outside of academia, doesn't really move the needle. It doesn't lead to behavior change. And that's one of the reasons I left. Penn is a wonderful university, but like many universities, it's incredibly siloed and the opportunity to come to Columbia and translate the work we've been doing into policy work, translates into putting that science into what I think are incredibly fun, attractive, and relevant reports like the World Happiness Reports as a Sustainable Development Solutions Network has been publishing since 2012. The OECD, we were just in Korea for an OECD World Forum on the future of well-being, and they have an amazing Better Life Index that is as robust, rigorous as an academic would love it to be, and as attractive, fun, and relevant that really moves the needle. And I think this is the real fear in academics that makes that trivializing or simplifying research too much might really dilute the rigor. And there's now MOOCs, Coursera, Foundations in Political Psychology, SDG Academy. There are really excellent ways of making research, again, fun, attractive, relevant. So well-being measurement, moving on to why this is now a science, is multi-method, and we have an amazing group of colleagues from the Positive Psychology Center who are computer scientists, and when I approach them, in the FMRI labs, we see how the brains of healthy individuals are actually different than the brains of depressed, clinically depressed individuals in the prefrontal cortex, in amygdala, and when I look at the data behind these FMRI scans, they look like this, which, you know, I see my computer scientists friends jumping up and down, and when I really don't understand why they're so joyous, the best they'll do is maybe put a little chart like that for me so that I know why they're so excited about these data. And this is great, the research, the rigorous research is necessary, but we need something like this, which really makes it relevant. This is a better approximation. This is essentially showing us the Easter limb paradox, which is after a certain income per capita, life satisfaction doesn't increase very much, so for poorer countries, increasing GDP is definitely desirable, after a certain amount, equality and equity are much more important than GDP per capita, but even better than that, and we actually worked interdisciplinary with people in the business school, marketing communications to be able to translate these big data measurements of well-being into something that's relevant, calling it the World Well-Being Project, and we can now map the well-being making it relevant to SDSN-USA of the U.S. in real time, using big data, using Twitter, Facebook tweets, and other psychometric real-time data to map the well-being of the U.S. at the county level, and you can see that well-being is pretty unevenly distributed. That for me is already pretty attractive. What made it fun earlier today is I decided to look up New York, and okay, wow, New York is overall higher than average, but when we zoom in a little bit, we can see that I've only been here in New York a little over a month, so King's New York, I assume, is the wealthier county. And New York is pretty high up. It's in the highest quintile, 86.2 percentile in terms of overall well-being, and again, this is combining fMRI data, survey data, real-time Twitter data. When you look at the Bronx, it's a little above average at the 54th or 55th percentile. When you look at Richmond, New York, that's significantly lower. So again, making it relevant, I think the graphics make it pretty user-friendly, fun, and it's much better, at least for me, than seeing just a lot of, I think that was R or some computer language that I personally don't understand. And finally, well-being we now know is malleable and buildable. And again, this is a meta-analysis of meditation and mindfulness interventions. We know work reliably using these pretty statistically robust t-tests with high p-values, but when we show this to policymakers particularly or even these larger interventions using large-scale cognitive therapy, this doesn't move the needle in our experience outside of academia. What we need, and this is my own research with colleagues, of course, in Bhutan, and this to us is pretty compelling, the fact that we can move something on a graph and chart, but only when we translate this to say, where are you in rankings in a way that's compelling, engaging, fun, and especially, are you close to the bottom of the ranking? These are rankings for happiness in countries around the world. And beyond that, how do we adapt to something that's locally and contextually relevant? After the data we had, we created a gross national happiness initiative in education. Gross national happiness is what Bhutan uses rather than GDP to measure progress. And finally, and this is kind of self-serving, but how do we get to create an enduring University of Pennsylvania with the Ministry of Education of Bhutan long-term collaborative research is you personalize this. You have to show pictures, you have to show behind the data and humanize that. And again, leverage what we know about positive, about psychology to really move the needle and be able to replicate this. We've been able to replicate this around the world, not in the U.S. yet, I like to think. And just a few, to finish off, just a few data points, I know I'm out of time. I think the sustainable development goals beyond being incredibly virtuous, the goals themselves have those three elements. They're attractive, they're fun, I like to think so, and they're definitely relevant. But we can make the metrics and particularly the implementation and policy components much more so. With things like showing in the U.S., even though income per capita has increased significantly and consistently since 1950s, the percentage of people who are very happy has remained stable at 30%. And as Jeff said earlier, there are opioid epidemics, depression, anxiety is going up. Why, if income keeps going up, is happiness not going up, social capital and social cohesion trust and so on are diminishing at a pretty alarming rate. Income, sorry, is not only income, but well-being is unequally distributed. And finally, we know, and this is the last point that I'll make, that SDG, or sorry, happiness rankings, which we see on the left, and SDG rankings, which we see in that middle column, are highly correlated. The correlation is about .75. The causal direction we are yet to find which it is, whether SDGs lead to well-being or the other way around. And by the way, taxes, effective tax rates are also pretty highly correlated to meeting the SDGs and happiness and well-being. So behavior change ahead, I think I'm actually quite optimistic if we're able to translate the research so that it's fun, actionable, attractive, and above all, relevant. So with that, let's take the best of what the corporate world has hacked, eliminate the worst, and let's get to work. Thank you. Higher authorities have informed me that we'll have 10 minutes for Q&A, so anybody have any comments, questions for any of these panels? Yes, sir. Okay, we'll go ahead while he's... Basal Dahir from Texas A&M University. I'd like to just build on the discussion that was mentioned on the city specifically in Los Angeles and also the following discussion on the SDGs and their connections and the role of universities and understanding those. In that context, I'd like to mention an initiative where we're working on at Texas A&M University, the Water Energy Food Nexus Initiative, which is three years old now. We've been focusing on specifically looking at the interconnections between the water energy and food SDGs and have been specifically focusing on the city of San Antonio in Texas, which is one of the rapidly urbanizing cities, neighboring the Eagle 4-Chail, where we have a lot of hydraulic fracturing happening and a lot of energy development, as well as a lot of agricultural activity also neighboring the city. So, in that context, I'd like to ask Jean a question. After developing the analytics and the tools within an interdisciplinary team on campus and assessing the different trade-offs associated with different policy interventions, different technology interventions, and different also social and behavioral interventions, we had the chance to meet with the community and with the stakeholders, including the city and other water and energy food stakeholders in the city. And we realized that despite their knowledge about the need for them to communicate more because of how interdependent they are, they did not necessarily have the mandate within their institutions to do that. So, there were several barriers that were discussed. What are your thoughts on how we could better engage those institutions and organizations that need to work better together so we're not only limiting the discussion of interdisciplinarity to the research area but also at the stakeholder level, and what role could the city have? Good question. Sure. So, just to keep it brief, we try to have transparency through the whole process, like probably to transparent. At the end of the projects, everything goes up on GitHub and open source so anybody else can use what we're doing and be able to comment on it or improve it. At the beginning, what we do is we work with the city departments to find out what's important to them that they're struggling with and we get them to sign up. And then they sign an agreement with our Data Science Federation that says you will not adopt what the students recommend, but listen attentively and try to see where that connects into your programs to make a change. And then we work really at the very beginning to connect other departments into that. So we structure it on a very city-centric aspect at the beginning and then to pull the universities in, we put all of our projects out to all of our universities at an open call. And so many universities might partner on a single project and then we get some interesting interdisciplinary research. But I think getting transparent at the beginning that those departments are going to have that you're addressing something they want and that they sign up to make a change. Great. Somebody there, sir? Hi. This is a question for the city's presentation. So we are sort of assuming that the growth of cities is inexorable, that it is unavoidable, that most people are going to continue to live in cities while at the same time we realize that cities are patently unsustainable from an ecological standpoint. So I'd like to recall a conversation with the chief resilience officer for Pittsburgh, Grant Urban, who said that all his urban sustainability problems in Pittsburgh actually originate in the rural areas, whether it's transportation, whether it is water shortages, everything originates in the rural areas. So are we imagining that cities can become sustainable without fixing the relationships between cities and their rural hinterlands? And how would that be done? How would we make cities sustainable while also making the hinterlands sustainable? Sounds like a good question for Bill. Yeah, that's a fun question. Thank you. Of course, we know that cities, you know, through their historical development became open cities. I mean, the whole, you know, sort of process of further, further extraction of a wood or water, et cetera, as part of the city's history, that involved bitter conflict and bitter contestation. I think in some ways the issue of resolving some of the questions of climate change and particularly those land-based solutions will kind of recall some of those tensions. So I very much agree with you. I think, you know, the issue of urban sustainability has to be embedded in this sort of rural, urban connection. There are some discussions about how to sort of approach that. Certainly in the context of the U.S. there have been a lot of legal agreements. I mean, the city of New York's water supply and Mike is still here, Mike Gerard. But I mean, that's a fascinating history of resource extraction from a city but also reconciliation over time. Unanswered but profound questions. Yeah, Thomas, did you? Yeah, Tom Gloria, Harvard University. This is directed as Bill as well. And it's just more of a shout-out. The IPCC report, 1.5, your report, you know, it's making curriculum incredibly fun and engaging right now. Table 5.2, page 481. It is in six-point type going through each one of the SDGs and the interrelationship of each one of them. In actions. This is the kind of deep thinking that we need. And then you said a nice precedent in that report. And I just want to thank you for doing it. Nice. I can't take too much for that, but other than that, that was heavily debated and contested on how to make that. So, you know, the integration of the SDGs and the implications of those are extremely interesting to be exploring. And universities' settings are a place where that can actually happen. And some cautionary tales here is that, you know, the suggestions of policies to deal with a particular problem, Canon often does have unintended consequences. And being able to think well beyond the present and try to figure that out is really important. And it's like this sort of big whack-a-mole game here. You kind of deal with one thing. Well, I'm sorry. Well, there was a cascading event that you didn't think of beforehand. And I think putting scholars on the task of trying to make sure that we do everything we can to avoid those downstream problems from upstream policy decisions, something that's a big challenge, and I think we're all up to it. Somebody else? Yes, sir? Neil Leary from Dickinson College. Bill earlier made reference to this idea of extension services of land grant universities. It has been focused in several areas and thinking about whether we can apply that model in urban settings. It seems to me that in the areas of health, nutrition, public health, a lot of our institutions are doing things that mimic extension services. And maybe if some of the panelists could talk a bit about how that works and is this the way that participatory action research, service learning, community based research break out of the bounds of where it's in public technology, can we apply this in ways that address more of the SDGs? Is this a model that we can use for our network to think about how we get involved with our communities? Who would like to respond to that? How about Shwana? Sure. I can start. Yeah, I think that's a great idea. And I think definitely I know at Rutgers the extension agents are going beyond just agriculture, they're providing nutrition education and that type of thing. But I think we can also learn from some of the experiences in the developing world. Like in New York there's community health workers. We don't often think about that. We think about that as being very much in a developing world context and they can actually be really nice in terms of what you're saying with the participatory kind of action and coming from the community and going up rather than being so top top down. So I think there's a lot of opportunities and I think at least my experience at Rutgers, which is a mammoth university, I have no idea what's going on. And then I learn about things and I'm like, wow, that's really cool and that fits within the type of work I do, but I'm just not aware of it. So I think we have to communicate better amongst ourselves to see what's going on and see how we might leverage those different activities that are already ongoing. Good. Thanks. Yes, ma'am. Yes. I'll just speak out here. Here it goes. Just identify yourself. I'm Elsa Moreno from Texas A&M University, the Borlaug Institute for International Agriculture and Development and I just wanted to echo the words of Shauna just now and to underscore the fact that extension services, extension systems at Langönt University are not only in the rural areas. They are very much in the cities. We have a big project at Texas A&M, Healthy South Texas because the southern part of Texas really by the border is where you have a lot of issues with lack of adequate nutrition and diversity of the diet and many other things, chronic diseases, diabetes, etc. So I just wanted to make sure that there was no misunderstanding that we have to somehow recreate something that's actually already exists and works very well in urban context. Thank you. One more question? Yes, sir. John Hardy Millenium Institute. Is this more of a personal comment and directed your good self for Professor Redelman? You correctly have the title of the US Health i.e. not the same as the rest of the world's health. Why is that? Why is it that you will still be addressing a system that is so dramatically different from that in virtually any other developed country that it's astonishing the best you can do is tinker with it. It still won't get where everybody else already is. Thank you. I think I'm going to ask Jeff to come. Well, I mean, look, the problems are widespread globally and we're trying to deal right now with the SDGs as they apply to the enormous challenges in America. I'm not suggesting tinkering in any way, shape, or form. I wish we had a very, very different kind of healthcare system because we're not going to get to those places that I talked about of a truly comprehensive, high-quality, evidence-based system in the absence of getting better at advocating for it. I'm not sure what you're saying, but I think we'll talk about that later. I would say, one other point in my last few seconds here at the podium, that we have to understand when we need to stop researching and start applying. This is a really important thing. I found a Carnegie Institute report. I think it was 15 years old but this happened to be about early childhood development. Every single principle and conclusion in that report was relevant today. They could have put 2018 in that book and it would have been entirely relevant. Yet we keep researching. It's time for the universities to say we get it, the research is the basis for what we want to do, but now we're into another agenda and that agenda is making stuff happen and not just in more development of the development projects pilot programs. It's time that we got serious about the macro changes that are going to help us save the planet. So with that have a good lunch. No, not yet. Oh my God. One more minute. That was wonderful presentations by everybody. I was going to say what Erwin said, so instead I'm going to just put an exclamation point in underlining. If you think about the challenges that we just heard on healthcare the United States is more than twice as expensive as any other country at this point. I think that's right. But basically that is true. We're at more than $9,000 per capita for a system that is delivering less than many, many other high income countries and with falling life expectancy as I noted. So we have a health cost crisis and an access crisis and a design crisis that is extraordinary by some dimensions well, by the dimensions of the rich world unique actually. If you look at the share of national income going to healthcare the US stands alone and then all the rest of the countries come with about 18% of GDP. Next is 12 and then a large block between 9 and 12% of GDP. That's an operational issue and there is now a move to an all-payer system or a single-payer system and Medicare for All is on the political agenda. This is for us to take up as an extraordinary issue because it is maybe the number one political issue in the country but for a reason and the pictures that Erwin showed but then the costs associated with that extraordinary extraordinarily oddly stretched and in many ways ineffective or impossible to navigate system make the situation in the United States extraordinary. That's one of the reasons why we're here. If you think about nutrition of course in any country of the world you could give a nutrition talk about the importance of nutrition in the United States has by far the highest obesity epidemic in the entire world. We have 70% overweight or obese and about 40% adult obesity. That's extraordinary and part of that is because that picture of that Alejandro showed of Coca-Cola should say unhappiness coming out the soda beverage because Coca-Cola is one of the champions unfortunately of the obesity epidemic because we know that soda beverages are among the most obesogenic products that we have. We and Coca-Cola and others have to get serious about that. So it's not academic if I may say to fellow academics that we're just looking at the normal situation we're looking at extremes and while the United States emissions is reduced of CO2 emissions and we had the president short all about that a few days ago because he doesn't understand the difference of change in levels the United States is emitting 16 tons of CO2 per capita about the highest in the world and for a large major economy absolutely devastating from the point of view of our role on climate change this is not academic in the sense in the pejorative sense of that word it means an action agenda but I would argue an action agenda is not a non-academic agenda an action agenda requires every bit as much of technical excellence scientific base evidence base management and systems thinking and an interdisciplinary frame for real implementation and application for some of these issues this can be done at the city level for some at the state level for some at the regional level for some at the national level but that's what we should be focusing on these are not close calls the US and the PAC these are incredible weird outcomes we're the only major country with falling life expectancy and when you think about opioids obesity epidemic depression epidemic it's not surprising we have and the inequality it's not surprising we have falling life expectancy but that's an extraordinary social crisis and by the way we analyze our happiness or our SDG index against individual determinants the as our team has shown us the single strongest correlation is with life expectancy it's kind of an overall measure of are things working or are they falling apart and to actually have a rich country and a business cycle peak with falling life expectancy is really odd peacetime more or less high employment and falling life expectancy that's a social crisis it reflects many phenomena but it's why we should be energized to an action agenda not a non-academic agenda not a non-rigorous agenda not a PR agenda but an action agenda I do believe our strongest point is we're not the best PR people we're not the best packaging people although Alejandro says we should package our work more happily I'm sure that's true but we are I hope systematic science evidence based technology based thinkers and now with an opportunity to do this together at a large scale on the question of why the US two issues I'd like to raise one the obvious one we are the US chapter of SDSN but at the same time let me state something we haven't discussed which is that the SDGs call for action within each country to contribute to solutions globally we've not really talked about the US role internationally we used to have a positive agenda about the US we didn't call it America first we didn't call it only us or whatever we did for a while have a very we invented development assistance literally as a matter of modern state craft we did in this country a lot of important contributions we still do by the way and not on a partisan basis by the way the president that was absolutely the most dynamic in the modern period in development assistance was George W. Bush Jr. by far he made the PEPFAR program the president's malaria initiative the founding member of the global fund to fight AIDS to be in malaria and I can tell you because I've been involved in this president Clinton and President Obama did basically treading water or even cutting while George Bush did a major expansion so this is not partisan at all but the US has a role also globally almost I'm sure all of you are working globally in that regard and in a very constructive way one way or another it should be part of our work as well and we haven't discussed that so much but I do think the time we just spent on these issues think about it not as the normal background challenges think of it as crisis there's a crisis we may not probably most of us were not feeling the crisis exactly in our daily lives but we can tell in our country this is a crisis and therefore I think we need to be engaged in the crisis solving and I think that that was Erwin's message the final point I want to make we were going to have the chance to meet Jackie Corbelli who is a leading business person in New York City a CEO of a major company here in IT and media and a very great friend of the sustainable development goals she's not feeling well today so unfortunately couldn't join the meeting but she has stepped forward to say that she wants to help lead the outreach to the business community and to civil society in a number of ways and to put together a citizens coalition for America's goals she wants to call it and I want you to be in touch with her we don't have the chance to meet her today but she sends her regards just woke up not feeling well she's been a bit under the weather but is very dynamic and very very keen for us to have one part of this as real outreach to the business world because this is absolutely an all of society effort we're holding the academics side but we need to reach out of course to as we've been discussing the mayors which were very much engaged with to the governor's association to Washington we'll hear a couple of leading lights on lunch and to the business community so Jackie's going to really help us do a great job on that and she sends her regards lunch time, thank you all very much hi Alex are you there yes I'm here hi I'm really sorry for the background noise this is Cheyenne Maddox I'm here with Professor Jeffrey Sachs oh no way this is Alex she's on the phone oh how's Andrea how's it going good good just got into Boston and we're settling in getting ready for our third leg of orientation to start oh great were you with Bernie last night yeah yeah we're at the climate change town hall last night did that go well oh it went really really well fantastic that's great let me tell you very quickly I'm here everyone's very excited to see you and to hear from you we put together about I think it's 60 or 70 universities from across the country there 39 states represented we counted up the enrollment across all the universities here it's 1.7 million students so it's a good good catchment and the whole discussion is around the sustainable development goals and how to achieve them in the U.S. so how to move to sustainable development we're not framing it you know in the internal discussion with Green New Deal but you should it can and it will all be understood and resonate that way we've talked about you know of course the energy agenda climate resilience healthcare access and costs nutrition crisis in the U.S. the city's agenda with a lot of very sophisticated people and I'm trying to I want this to become a kind of virtual think tank for you and colleagues tap this as and I'm going to push them just so you know by the end of the day let's have by September or if you tell me sooner let's have a draft policy framework say for decarbonization a lot of sophisticated engineers and I want to combine both their knowledge and their legitimacy as representing universities across the country so that this is not one place one school one region making a claim but actually emerging as a consensus of 50 state of colleges and universities from 50 states and I'll work on that you know in the coming weeks and months and I want to kind of give them the charge that this would be really helpful in Washington that it's important that the universities in the U.S. step up to these very big challenges and use the best knowledge and thinking and coordinate together and that Congress is going to be working exactly on these issues in the coming months and the more we can hear of solid ideas and so on this is going to be helpful helpful to you so every everyone's thrilled you're coming in I should let you know that Tulsi Gold gathered is and fabulous he's going to come in in the room sometime between 215-330 so she'll be physically present you'll be speaking by Skype we could have you both you know saying hi to each other if the timing works out yeah that'd be great but she's obviously wonderful and a huge fan of yours so it's it's as we are so it's a fantastic thing so I think it's a great constituency in a wonderful group and the energy level is high and the mood is very good and giving them a sense of empowerment that we need to hear from you and we need to fill in with the deep knowledge what a green new deal means how it can be implemented how we can get the country turned in this new directions will be the key and you know speak however long you like but five ten minutes opening maybe a question or two and you know we'll play it play it by ear but as you'd like yeah absolutely no that sounds perfect and I can't thank you enough for bringing all these people together you know I think that's really how we're going to not just build the political power for this but really just get them a comprehensive policy possible and I'm really looking forward to you know us really kind of cracking this nut in policymaking and I feel like we're very much on track where sometimes movements and activist groups feel disconnected from the academic consensus from the legal framework and I'm really excited because I feel like all of these pieces are coming together before any laws are written so that's going to be really exciting and with Sheikha you know he was asking me oh my god you know all these schools what are we supposed to do and I will help you coordinate that that's my role to make sure that we are kind of steering, coordinating moving together and so on but that's really the goal of the whole thing and I do think we can bring the pieces together and what I'm hoping is as even more schools join you know some of your new colleagues who are not so enthusiastic on this agenda will find that they're leading colleges and universities of which they are very proud are telling them congressman this works this is important please get on the case so I think it can actually work in an almost in a district by district way also so that that's part of a yeah absolutely absolutely I'm excited I'm excited wonderful we'll see you in a little while and have fun at Harvard and we'll see you on the screen and just we'll do thank you so much it's a lot talk to you we'll be getting started in just a couple minutes Glenn Galloway is hey Glenn great wonderful do we have name cards and Tom I just saw Tom oh you're here good okay perfect great great thank you so we're going to turn to a an absolute core area for all of us and that is teaching and hear about ideas and thoughts and brainstorming on teaching sustainable development we'll start with Tom Gloria at Harvard and then Glenn Galloway University of Florida oh you're switching it okay Tom is going to start please I said that's what I said I said starting with Tom no but who's start you're starting oh that's what I said when I switched okay keystone cops we're starting with Glenn Galloway right here and then we will go to Tom Gloria hi everybody so let's see how this thing okay first of all I want to thank Maria and Jeff for the invitation to come and share some experiences with you I'm from the University of Florida and I'm the Master of Sustainable Development Practice Program it's really part of a program that I'm going to be discussing this afternoon which is the Master of Development Practice Program and I'll be providing you a little bit of background on this program so you understand what it is and then I will some of the important lessons and experiences that we've had over the last 10 years since the program was established and recently we did a study with alumni of the program so I'll provide you with some results of that survey or it wasn't actually a survey it was actually a semi-structured interviews that were carried out by alumni of the program and then I'll finish up with some conclusions so this gives you a map a world map of where the MDP programs were located this program actually began here in Columbia University Earth Institute received funding from the MacArthur Foundation back in 2007 and they launched an international commission on education for sustainable development to practice it's very important to add that word practice to identify gaps in the training of development practitioners and recommend improvements for professionals that work in the development space and the results of this commission was the creation of this Master of Development Practice program it began with some seed funding from the MacArthur Foundation something like 11 programs initially were funded and around the world the program was launched 10 years ago like I said in New Delhi and since then it has grown it's between 36 and 38 programs we're here with Lucia Rodriguez who's the director of the secretariat of the MDP program here in Columbia University so I have to be quite honest with what I'm presenting here today also at this program you know you get a sense of in that map where the programs are located you can see like in North America we have more programs than in most other regions of the world here at Columbia also Harvard and Thomas is going to present after me Lehi is in the process of joining the program Emory and the University of Florida the program located University of Minnesota Regis University in Denver, Colorado University of Arizona and Berkeley and I don't know if George Sharpenberger is patched in but if he is, hello George so another thing that came out of this commission was the recommendation of establishing a program with a strong interdisciplinary focus recognizing that a development practitioner needs a strong holistic interdisciplinary understanding of and that was one of the things that they found that was a gap in academic programs and development so it was structured around these four pillars social sciences natural sciences health sciences and management and in each of the universities they had core courses inside each of those pillars also these pillars they recognize there's a lot of interconnections among these different pillars the one thing that all the universities in the MDP Global Consortium have in common is they have of course a very strong interest in development and also in sustainability but the emphasis of the individual programs varies considerably as you could imagine you saw the map in the previous slide in some areas like the University of Botswana for example would have very different capacities than Columbia University or Harvard so the way the program is actually implemented in different universities around the world actually has to be quite distinct I should also mention here that one thing that has been common across all the programs is what we call the global classroom initially it was run out of here out of Columbia University in the last number of years using Jeff's book on the age of sustainable development but it's a foundational course because as you'll see a little later on the students that come into the MDP program have very diverse disciplinary backgrounds so it's important to have a foundational course that's basically structured around in this case the SDGs so that everybody has kind of a common foundation of understanding sustainable development. Another thing that we realized early on in implementing this program was the importance of having a balance among these interrelated student learning outcomes related to the knowledge skills and professional behavior of course you can have very knowledgeable people but if they lack the skills they're not going to be very effective development practitioners. You can have people that are very knowledgeable and skillful but if they have inappropriate professional behavior in intercultural context they're not going to be very effective development practitioners either. So it's very important that students understand the distinction between knowledge and skills knowledge you could acquire rather quickly through reading and study and so forth but skills really require practice to hone and to master. So you have to create within these programs a lot of opportunities for practice and you can see it's everything from communication writing, oral communication to using participatory methods having analytical skills and so forth is what we cover in the program. Another important piece of the MDP program is what we call the field practicum and this is generally between the first and second year of the master's program which is like a 10 to 12 week period where students go off to different parts of the world it could be right here in the United States there's no problem with that but in the case in the University of Florida almost all of our students have gone to Latin America, Africa and also in sub cases in Asia. The field practicum the students have to contact a host organization and they have to define with a host organization a topic of mutual interest and define deliverables that the student needs to deliver at the end of the field practicum and the types of host organizations are very broadly everything from NGOs to public sector entities international organizations private sector educational organizations community based et cetera and this is just five minutes left that's all I have, okay so I gotta get moving and this is just from the University of Florida which is not one of the larger programs in the network where our field practicums have been carried out but I'll just move along so I want to get into some of these important lessons first of all like the SDG agenda as I already mentioned the interest of students are quite broad and this implies the importance of having personalized learning because you want to be able to provide different options for students that have different disciplinary interests so this implies the need for strong cross departmental collaboration which in conversations I've had with some of you I know this is a challenge because of institutional and financial arrangements within the universities and it's important to have that collaboration because you want to offer a range of alternative elective courses for the students and also in our model the faculty members serve on student committees another important lesson is that from alumni and also from the employers of our alumni that it is very important what we've heard earlier this morning that students have this very broad cross disciplinary and cross sector understanding of sustainable development challenges and for this reason although they have specific disciplinary interests they also appreciate the cohort model in which they get to work with students with other disciplinary interests and in this way they're exposed to an array of different disciplinary interests and I reached out to the directors of the MDP programs when I was invited to give this talk and I said what one thing would you recommend for this audience and they said to stress the importance of integration inherent in sustainable development and there's different types of integration across sectors disciplines and stakeholders linkages we've heard a few people mention synergies and trade-offs implicit in the SDG agenda and they're also looking across time because you have long short-term and medium-term perspectives and needs related to sustainable development another important lesson is this importance of being able to reconcile this broad understanding and complex nature of sustainable development which can be quite daunting and overwhelming actually for students once they enter grasp what they're getting involved in with a rather narrow space that one actually works in so it's important that students understand that even if they're working on developing a curriculum or doing some sort of developing a monitoring and evaluation plan for sustainable development initiatives that's fine that's an important contribution you're not going to solve everything in sustainable development in a two-year program so I have two more minutes okay another thing that we have found is that in the MDP program we have students coming in with very diverse perspectives of sustainable sustainability and you see different examples there everything from the growth to corporate driven development and so forth for a program like the MDP or if you want to have a program of sustainable development it's important to place the program right in the center of those you have to open up spaces to accommodate and critically discuss these different views on sustainability in a program like the MDP the field practicum which I mentioned before really is the capstone experience it forces the students to gain a lot of knowledge about context and about the conceptual underpinnings of their work it provides them an opportunity to actually practice to gain skills like participatory methods and so forth in a real world context and also gives them a wonderful opportunity to actually put their professional behavior to test in complex context often intercultural context so I think I'll just pass over that and finally another important lesson and this I think you all would agree with this that the students that come into a program like the MDP are often very passionate driven individuals and they're anxious to get involved in something so it's advisable early on to identify opportunities for them within the local community to get involved and there's just a list of what our students have done within Gainesville some of these have been driven by the students themselves developing these different types of working groups and so forth I won't read through that list with regard to the feedback from our students from this recent alumni survey you can see the type of knowledge areas that they have indicated are important to their employers and they think are trending over time into the future and the things that we have talked about this morning have the ability for abstract cross-disciplinary and cross-sectoral thought something that we didn't have in the original report to the commission that was financed by the MacArthur Foundation is this idea of systems thinking but it bubbled up quite high in this study with the MDP alumni and the other topics there are also quite important and of course they're all included in the SDG agenda in the last is really talking about entrepreneurship that's the role of the corporate sector but also the corporate sector or the private sector that's quite small entrepreneurs with regard to skills the one that was most mentioned analytical skills because there's a lot of interest in supporting or contributing to monitoring and evaluation efforts of sustainable development initiatives we've talked about the importance of data this morning and then these other skills of cultural sensitivity and communication critical thinking project management and networking and I just want to show one more slide here we complimented the study with alumni with a couple results meta-analysis comparative analysis on the same topics and you'll see the list of things that 28 NGO managers with more than 10 years experience indicated as important for their employees or development practitioners and also for 2500 development professionals a DEVEC study that was carried out and you can see that there's a lot of agreement among these different studies about the types of knowledge skills and professional behavior that are important for development of practitioners so if you are getting involved in a program of sustainable development I think this type of information is very important to think about creating opportunities for practice also emphasizing the importance of professional behavior and also of course creating a hunger for knowledge so I think I have to leave it there I had a couple more quick slides over to Thomas hey good afternoon everyone so a couple of big takeaways on what I'm about to present and first of all it's a discussion on a journey to create an MDP program in the last couple of years at Harvard University that's small New England College up in the Boston area and so I'm the director of the program the Masters in Development Practice Program as well as the sustainability program there and so of course I mentioned that the Global Association represents several different partners they engage at several different levels not only in terms of the direct curriculum development but also at levels of the associate level as well so there's a variety of different factors that you can engage or levels you can engage with and us being the more recent one we're up to as my understanding is 38 at this point so it's a growing organization and what's the most important about this is that we do a point of direction so we knew where we were headed because of the work that the Global Association has been doing over the last 10 years and I put that out as a model of what this chapter could do at the national level we could think of other models like MDP that would help us whether that be more technical whether they might be related to policy or law or whatever discipline it may be we think about how we can develop these models to accelerate the development of programs and so the extension school now the extension school is going to be a little bit out of the box for many of you in terms of model but I know that many of the universities do have extension schools and I kind of like to say that its extension school has really become the nexus school and why that's so important so the extension school is 110 years old and it's part of Harvard University that had this tradition of the Harvard yard bars opened up and allowing us to have education that was accessible to the community locally, affordably and also lifelong learning so those three major things are the tradition of the extension school which to me resonates a lot with where we're headed in the sustainable development area and so we offer a master's in development practice is part of our program now how do I do that from a curriculum standpoint well we're Harvard University and we have the structure some of what Glenn had said in terms of boundaries of paying your instructors boundaries of how do you get each one of the courses that are accessible to your students in an open enrollment environment and so we draw from the Graduate School of Design the Harvard Medical School the Divinity School, the School of Public Health and the porosity of that structure allows me to create this multidisciplinary environment and I know that that's something that is an incredible luxury to have with administrative burdens too. I have in my program 150 faculty and each year I have to up their contracts we have over 980 faculty members as part of the extension school and so we administer one year contracts with each and every individual every single year and so with that we can also have our Harvard University ladder and tenure faculty but also those who are outside of the Harvard University as well and even practitioners who are developing innovative areas of interest by our students so what does our student body look like? Well in this case in the development area we're seeing folks retooling so our average age is about 37 and they're coming from areas around the world and many of them are outside of the United States 80% of my students are outside of Massachusetts we are a distance learning organization so that's the other piece of what we're doing to break the model as a distance learning organization we have a larger reach for those interested in sustainability now the other thing that's a real issue with many of those pursuing a degree is how do they quit their job and afford education and so part-time education is another area that we break the model as well folks are not able to leave work and quit their jobs take care of family etc. they need to do this part-time and so we're flexible in that aspect as well so flexibility is a big piece of the success of what we're doing at this point and encourage you as well because in many cases our students are only taking one course a semester it takes them anywhere between three to five years to get their degree many of them are retooling some of them are career changing and that leads to a huge if you will diversity diversity of the types of students that we have we have students that go on to work for Greenpeace and we have students that go on to work for Goldman Sachs it is an enormous diversity in terms of what we're serving and what they're going on moving forward so with that very diverse student body flexibility as I mentioned is a main factor here and so breaking the model and many of you probably have distance learning initiatives going on at your universities we're just doubling down on this we have about 17,000 students right now who are part of our extension school and we look at three different modalities those being on campus those that are taking courses online and asynchronously so they take them at the time that they need to be in classroom environments and then also we have hybrid courses courses that are held at the Harvard University campus and around the world as well so we just continue to break this model of where is the campus, where is the access to students and both vice versa access to faculty so a little bit about the MDV curriculum and I will make my slides available to anyone who would like them so I'm going to go through some details here we have this mission around solutions that's what we're doing we're scaling up as Jeff was mentioning it's all about action and that's what we're about as well and so our existing sustainability program that has about 310 students right now that is our mission that has now blended into the MDP program and as Glen had mentioned essentially the MDP program is putting a couple of guardrails on what we've already done in sustainability there's the management sciences and the social sciences that is economics and policy and the built environment and so we've added then management sciences on top of human health and well-being so that aspect of who we're delivering then in terms of education needs to cover these four areas and allow for a lot of flexibility so the global classroom as Glen mentioned as well as fields of study these are if you will the bookends of part of our program there's the guided curriculum I'm not going to go over that in detail again essentially it's a la carte once we get them in because there's such a diversity of the students and that's what we're able to do because we're pulling across the entire university and elsewhere we also get into this aspect of the field study work and it's all about action and that means that the students are working on a sustainability development action plan as part of the end goal this is what they're doing they're working with a client or a sponsor if you will in determining what it is they need to do so they get the skill sets the knowledge and then if you will exercising the muscles of action and then all our courses and this is part of the program at the MDP is radically open in the sense that you can go on our website you can see all of the courses you can see all of the syllabi of all of the courses that are being taught and get a good sense of the type of curriculum that's out there and then one other aspect that's kind of broken the model for us is we've recently partnered with MIT just down the road from us they have something called a micro masters if you haven't heard about micro masters it's basically if you will the stepping stone of getting into a program for them it's a part of their admissions process for us we basically credit four courses towards our degree program it allows for flexibility greatly reducing the cost micro masters are in the order of a thousand to five thousand dollars to get and receive that and it greatly reduces our cost to the student somewhere in the order of ten thousand dollars overall a degree for our programs about thirty K so we're actually reducing the cost of our program about a third and these are available to any university this is a pathway that you can sign up with them and this is through the poverty action lab at MIT which is greatly aligned in the development practice in and of itself so highly encourage those who are interested in again trying to get curriculum up to speed in your programs as well as again bending the cost curve so I'd like to finish up on who are these students and what do they look like well for me we just started our program a couple of months ago and so we're open enrollment so we're just getting a couple of students get and meet the requirements of enrolling in Harvard Business School she's on the avenue of the cheapest route for master's program it's forty dollars a course if you're an employee of Harvard University so think about that think about other people in your institution and the tuition breaks that you get this is a huge pool of people who are highly engaged and to ramp up the courses in enrollment to justify them so this is something that's really a nice strategy for us Nagwa Iwad she's based here in the New York, New Jersey area so she has access, she's a working mom she's in the IT sector in healthcare and she's retooling mid-career person and the last one, Hadiza Hamas she's in Nigeria waking up at three in the morning to take our courses at four in the morning and she's incredibly motivated and what's so wonderful about the story of Hadiza she's that next person we're going to start a program at the University of Mujia in MDP so this is part of our role here at the U.S. chapter is educating the next educators across the world so a very important role I had tons of messages throughout my entire very short presentation but we'll open it up for discussion now thanks good afternoon marvelous presentation I'm John Dillard from St. Francis College in Brooklyn, New York trying to diversify our revenue streams through graduate programs and some of the stuff that you're doing Thomas seems to blend really well with things we're already sort of starting in process there's a masters in healthcare management that includes a management portion of that the issue we face is making sure we have enough instructors so as a suggestion or a thought about maybe sort of another way to change the model is there any possibility of doing something like instructor sharing among the U.S. chapter so that we would open up our students to having instructors elsewhere both to complement what we're trying to do and then just build the MDP yeah it is an issue again as I indicated the extension is cool because of the porosity of the instructors in other words I can pull faculty from anywhere essentially anywhere around the world and so I'm able to do that in terms of sharing you know that I'll say the word multiple times but the crustiness of our organization is that the sharing goes one direction very similarly with MIT so if you wanted to have students take our courses which are online as an example they're more than welcome to do so and then be recognized by your registrar we actually had students in Columbia University take our courses and have them acknowledge this credit in their programs so there's that capability the unlocking of education in an online format essentially making it geographically agnostic helps that process we've apparently answered all the questions Glenn thank you it was great to learn about the MDP program when I first heard about it a number of years ago I thought it sounded to me like something was feeling a very strong need in the development education we field I'm more of a comment than a question and that is while thinking about master's level education is critically important to the SGDGs many of our institutions are very much engaged in what might be phrased sustainability across the curriculum undergraduate education making it part of every student's education so that like we now at Dickinson College have a requirement that every student has to have a sustainability related course and that can include things like a course on arts and civic engagement where sustainability is woven in in some light ways and so I just want us to not lose track of that that there are groups that work on this there's something called the sustainability curriculum consortium that's a group that we want to interact with does some things so there's workshops that have been done by Peggy Barlett at Emory University Jeff Chase who I think is at San Diego State now I think he's moved a couple of times they've trained about 600 faculty from a bunch of schools in how you integrate sustainability across the undergraduate curriculum and those that's his bond there's probably three dozen or more schools that now run these programs on their own campuses so at Dickinson we run workshops for faculty development to train faculty from arts and humanities social sciences, physical sciences to integrate sustainability in the past just this past year we've pivoted and focused on sustainable development as being part of that of what we're embracing but there's a lot of work going on out there and I'm hoping that we're going to see how we can participate and engage that work in the SDSM I would second particularly the organizations the AC and the sustainability curriculum consortium the SEC they're two great organizations to engage with there's a question in the back on the left emphasis on systems thinking and also on field experience and practicums but if you're running building a network two things seem to be important one is quality control with something like a practicum so are you actually running practicums for the student in Nigeria at a local place or how would that work or is that not happening with distance education right okay so a little bit more on the details so we have residency requirement of a semester through our extension program so that particular student Hadizahama we'll be coming to Cambridge Massachusetts for the summer we'll go over who our client is and what she's going to be working on but we are leveraging actually a global practice at the local level so that's part of what we're trying to do so that's part of our quality assurance of what's going on and certainly as we're rolling out this program it's certainly in front and center for us who that client or if you will sponsors going to be and how they engage with them is very important and that is part of the aspects that's going to be challenging to scale to take your question a little bit I visualize this as a pyramid in terms of education like mentioning the MicroMasters education in MIT it's kind of the base of the pyramid microeconomics, some data analytics introductory levels of foundation and then we move up in that pyramid to the next level of courses that are online but higher touch and then we get to the top of that period and that's the field study work and that is a substantial amount of if you will support for that student making sure that the programs that they're interacting with are of the quality that we want and so again trying to bend that cost curve is like build out the base of pyramid as much as we can and maybe Glenn can offer some more in his experiences in terms of the field study work yeah in our case in University of Florida like I mentioned our students actually have a committee so it's amazing how diverse we've had students that have done joint law MDP degrees working on issues like human trafficking analysis of legal framers for example the forestry legal framework was changed recently in Mexico we've had business MDP working with entrepreneurs for example in South Africa with corporate social responsibility like in the tourism industry but the thing is they always have linkages to departments within UF so they have on their committee specialists in those areas so they have to develop just like in a scientific masters program they have to develop a proposal then they carry out the field practicum a lot of times they develop in addition to the deliverables they always have to develop like a final report where they get the opportunity to actually practice writing an extensive document so yeah in our case it's very structured the way we carry out the field practicum has pretty high standard of quality and if I can just follow up with a comment I think if this network develops alumni could be a very important resource because you'd have them all over the world and they'd be thinking have the same systemic thinking and problem solving skills but also for universities like I'm from the University of Alaska we have opportunities in our state which is like a developing country in a lot of ways that cannot be fulfilled by our students because we don't have enough so I think there's an opportunity for sharing such opportunities as well just a really quick comment that's a really good observation about the alumni in some of our classes the alumni now patch in from their professional positions to share their experiences and development with our students so over time and the network originally I don't think it was envisioned how many students from our foundation initially funded the program but there are I think around 3,000 graduates around the world now so it's an extensive resource to draw on. Absolutely second that it's gotten to the point with my sustainability program that we're graduating about 100 students a year now and so that's an incredible resource in terms of new projects for students to work on TA assistance for the instructors being instructors it's an incredibly network of people that we tap. Can I just ask about your staff discount model Thomas and the amount it costs for a Harvard staff member to take the whole master's degree and any further comments you've got on how that aspect of the program, what percentage might be drawn from staff and how does that influence the quality of the program and what's it contributing? Yeah sure so the tuition assistance program the tap program's been around for I think more than two decades now it is I just to be very honest about it's not taken advantage of very highly it's $40 a course. One could get a graduate degree at Harvard University if you're an employee for about $600 that's the cost of it and I understand we have something like 43 openings in our own division of continuing education so it's an enormous if you will benefit to our students. The U.S. National Science Foundation and I just wanted to let you guys know that we also have a program that is designed exactly for this kind of approach so if you have an active NSF grant and you want to have your graduate student engage in a non-research experience with an NGO or whatever policy whatever we have you can get up to six extra months of support for those students to engage in this so keep that in mind as you're putting your master's groups together again it's very similar you have to have a coordinating entity so a group where the student is going to actually go and work but we will actually help support that as well. Any other questions? Okay just as a comment my own observation is educating professionals are going to enter either the sustainability or sustainable development field by and large what the earning power is going to be is probably either going to be the same level of where they are prior to entering the program as they exit the program and so cost for many of the students is incredibly important it's incredibly important that is what we're faced with in this field as we as educators whatever we can do with our institutions whether it be scholarships tuition reimbursement etc this is incredibly important for us to accelerate what we're trying to do with your incredible presentations and being an alum of Harvard myself I have a few questions for you I just wondered if either of you envisage anything in particular going forward like a 5 year plan or a 10 year plan how you imagine that your programs in sustainable development could be expanded or change in what directions what else would you bring on board thank you go ahead it's interesting that right now I mentioned this study that we carried out with the alumni into the program that one of the ideas was to see what kind of changes might be recommended in the curriculum and the way the program is conducted and that's actually funded with a grant that the Columbia University received from the CHIA foundation and what they're doing is they're returning to the original report of the commission on sustainable development practice to see how the program might evolve in the coming years the other thing that surprised us about the program is that a fair percentage of our graduates end up going into doctoral programs we didn't really expect that so at some point I think we might have to think about having an option also for doctoral students because a lot of the research activities they get involved in around the world require more than 10 to 12 weeks of research so it would be interesting to have at least that option for because the faculty are interested they're interested in working with the students and sometimes it would be interesting to have them for a longer period of time working on really interesting issues thank you for that moment of being able to think about this incredible question so a couple of things on it we have a blue who used to be our dean of our summer school which is part of the division in continued education has recently started something called lab X and what Rob is trying to do is essentially accelerate the accessibility of very relevant case study work that would be accessible not only to those at Harvard University but more in like he was part of running our Harvard X which is part of edX basically breaking the barriers of education and so I reflect on his vision and that is in this era of urgency that Jeff reminds us of the acceleration of what works is going to be key and so within the next couple of years I think that we can use the various networking technologies etc. communities that brings awareness around what is relevant what is successful is incredibly important because we are past the days of just getting the funding just finding the people we have to figure out exactly what are the strategies that truly work and as again Jeff hammers us with an evidence based process and so seeing the evidence is going to be incredibly important accessibility to that evidence I think is really the next phase we are going to be getting into My name is Shannon Cobert I am an education manager at the SDG Academy and I just wanted to make everyone in the room aware of our resources. SDG Academy is an online education initiative actually from the SDSN and we create online graduate level upper level courses on all of these topics sustainability topics so if anyone is interested in learning more maybe you want to describe what it is yeah absolutely so they are online courses like I said MOOCs massive open online courses through edX we are now on edX as well so different they pull together from the network that SDSN has created and experts across the field and across the world to bring together I think right now we have reached over 200,000 learners around the world that work in policy civil society academia and just open to anyone with a mind to learn more about these topics natural resource governance economics early childhood development so let me add thanks for bringing it up because it is something also for us to contemplate we have the idea is a full curriculum for free online not an accredited program because that requires a university base of course but this is a full sustainable development curriculum at the MOOC level what MOOCs can do they can do certain things they can't do other things let's be clear about that but by full curriculum I mean that it's about 25 courses now on many different dimensions of our issues from health education gender poverty reduction, hunger land use, energy transformation and so on and it is an edX offering and it's seen by tens of thousands of people around the world at any time there's lots of participation but we would like more participation and also more engagement and added modules and different ways to do this as well now we should also offer an SDSN USA series of lectures or something by webinar so that we have throughout the year lectures that are being given by leaders of our whole network and then students are assigned or are welcome or the public is welcome to join and everything in our in the SDSN global world all the offerings are for free so we're trying to make this a very broad based mass accessibility feature the materials are also being used for UN training now so there's a new codder of coordinators that is being brought on specifically to lead the SDG era and a lot of these online courses are being used for that so I just want to invite people to have a look SDG Academy easy to find but also to engage make suggestions missing curricula we produce a lot of courses but if you want to produce some MOOCs this is an opportunity to coordinate on that as well and I would like to have a large basically encyclopedic coverage of these issues built and worldwide with worldwide accessibility there's a lot of effort incidentally to localize the courses to specific issues in different parts of the world and so a lot of curriculum building so that one sees all of this from the vantage point of different regions but that can be different regions also within the United States or this curriculum as we have it right now is not especially a US curriculum so we could even imagine a group course on SDGs in the US does not exist but that might be quite a nice thing for us to group manage and develop because if you think about it all our students should take such a course specifically what does this mean for the US all the things we're talking about there's no place they can find that specifically right now so I like my idea and I rather like the idea that we do it together so count that as a proposal not just a balloon over my head why don't we do a course on SDGs in the United States I don't know how we're going to do it but if you're interested sign up sign up by the way for all of what we're talking about means send an email to Caroline or to Maria that's what sign up practically means so that we're engaged for the moment one other question I want to ask all of you as a group I want you to be able to contact each other your names are on the website as attendees of this meeting but no contact information so I don't quite mean this but by a show of hands in principle are you happy to have your email addresses next to your names is there anybody that does not want their email address and you can submit that in private but there's too much concern actually about not enabling the contact information because I don't want everything to come to us I wanted to go between you so quite seriously if there's anyone today that just says don't put my name on this list I don't even like it or for many reasons I'm not even supposed to be here today and my president thinks I'm somewhere else whatever it is if you have that reason let me know otherwise oh god I don't know if this is possible or not but I want to suggest that the default is your email is going to be next to your name because I want you to talk to each other the idea is not a hub and spoke model the idea is a full graph okay a complete graph where you're all nodes and you're all connected to all other nodes so that's what we're going to do we'll do it by tomorrow not today just so truly if someone doesn't want that contact we will leave the name off but otherwise all your emails will go alongside your names and today you're just on a blog site announcing this but we'll have an SDSN USA website within the next few days and that will also be open for you to post stuff on this as well so that it really is an open feature okay good thanks I just wanted to jump in on the SDG Academy stuff for a minute I sort of as a testimonial I've taken several of the courses already I've integrated two of them in existing courses that I teach at St. Francis College and I'm going to try to use it the St. Francis College has become part of the university partnership program where we're going to try to integrate more of those courses throughout our curriculum so not only are the courses just very good to take and sort of enlarge your own educational experience but they could be used as ways to try to integrate sustainability across the curriculum so I really encourage you again to take a look at what's there and enroll yourselves and think about how you can use them in your classes Mike Mann for the University of North Dakota I think when you talked about your model in terms of how you do the masters and even Ph.D. programs online obviously some of the smaller universities I think it's difficult to do at a smaller scale but North Dakota we formatted our Ph.D. in energy system engineering and environmental engineering to almost exactly what you've done we offered online it's very flexible recognizing the students that are interested in energy or environmental engineering is very broad and broad topic area so this is what I think with the right kind of planning to really buy in and take advantage of everybody across the whole university I think is doable at almost any level for us online education was an evolution it started off with the 1960s there were videotapes of our courses that were then handed to naval officers and staff to go on submarines to take courses that was like our first entree into distance learning since then kind of like the Wall Street Journal in the sense of once you create stuff online it's very challenging when you create it for free to roll that back so as our courses became online it was always seamless it was like any of our other courses so for those of you I would more than happy to have a discussion with around if you're thinking about distance learning and what we've had to do in terms of staff and the gross underestimation is if you will the back office and what it takes to run a distance program it's incredibly challenging to maintain the quality as we heard the question earlier but to be able to again make your courses accessible and not only am I available I know my staff who does the online production they're more than happy to speak with folks about what they've done and what they do they give you a sense of what we do on a weekly basis we run about 500 courses semester and about 60-70% of them are online so we're producing 352 hour shows every week and the students expect them to be up recorded ready to go within an hour or two and that's the expectation and that's what we deliver on we're like a mini production house at this point you know 352 hour shows 14 weeks straight, don't miss a beat get everyone right or we'll hear it we'll hear it from the students I think we've answered your questions thank you everyone in the stretch run here and I want to turn attention to a question that all of you must spend time thinking about and frankly President this morning how important it is for all of us to think about how the issues of sustainability play out in practice and on the ground and one of the challenges in that regard is the politics of advancing sustainability so we now have a panel one of three of whom are present with us in a moment a second will arrive momentarily and a third will be Skyping in at the top of the hour but I want to start with Daniel Squadron former New York State Senator or do we have getting a signal from the back a false signal from the back we will jump to the Congresswoman on the screen at the moment we'll get the signal that she's ready to go so we will have that interruption at some point in a few moments Daniel is a former New York State Senator one of the youngest ever elected and chose a year and a bit ago to leave the State Senate after nearly a decade to launch with others a group called Future Now and he's going to tell us a little bit about this it is a group focused in making change happen at the State level as we've discussed over the course of the day and really thinking about how to make sustainability and sustainable development and all of the related elements that we've had under discussion here today a part of the political agenda at that more disaggregated level the focus really is on state legislatures which is an under attended to part of the political conversation in many places across this country but let me ask Daniel to tell us a little bit more about what he's doing thank you very much and thank you for having me I am speaking to this group which is so focused on global issues so focused on research and knowledge and facts I'm really putting in mind of the old Monty Python sketch or line now for something completely different I'm here to talk about politics which some would argue of course I do not subscribe to this is the opposite of the sort of rigorous fact based analysis and work that you all many of you do with your lives and to talk about state government the smallest really powerful note of government really structurally around the world but certainly in this country I think people will often put cities like New York certainly ahead of state government and state legislatures when it comes to influence but of course I'm here and I wouldn't have had the very generous invitation from Professor Sacks and others who organized this if there wasn't a similarity in a relationship and that I have found in the political arena and I have found a real connection to the work of the sustainable development goals is that the ideas and more importantly the idea of goals that are measurable is actually a really powerful one in the political sector and even beyond that in a country like ours that's written by what seems to be reactionary or non fact-based politics the idea of returning to facts and to goals that are about broad human development are wildly popular so with that I'll pause I hear that congressmember elect Ocasio-Cortez is available and we'll hear her perspective from the house I guess so welcome welcome representative elect Ocasio-Cortez thank you very much for taking time out of what I know is a very busy scramble to get yourself ready to take office in just a few weeks to be with us here and to address the group that's gathered as part of the sustainable development solutions network for the United States Jeff Sacks asked me to by way of introduction mention how proud he and so many others are in this room of what you're doing to bring new leadership to the congress and especially eager to hear about the green new deal but please tell us whatever you think the audience might want to hear about how to bring sustainability into the political conversation and how to make it a foundation in a much more fundamental way for the kind of politics that I know you're trying to advance in Washington and others care about in this group all across the country thank you no of course thank you all so so very much and thank you for really having the energy and the ability and the will to really organize and convene so many experts academics activists and organizers in really getting us to a collective vision for our future especially when it comes to the climate for our climate and especially when it comes to what we're forming out here in what is taking shape as the green new deal I cannot I really cannot underscore enough the importance of movement based legislation which I think is what a green new deal is starting to shape up to be and when we say movement based legislation what we mean is that very often when we create a legislation some critical constituency or some critical expertise gets left out whether it's policy making that happens without information from frontline communities with the direct experiences whether it's without scientific consensus as we're seeing with this administration or whether it's without the navigation of the current political obstacles that we can have or the knowledge of those political obstacles it's really when we come together as a movement that we can develop comprehensive legislation like a green new deal as many may know what we are currently pushing for although I am not sworn in yet is a select committee to be established to create and really research and develop a green new deal by 2020 so that as we are doing the critical organizing of winning back the presidency the senate and maintaining a house majority in 2020 if we can accomplish that then if our select committee gets established and we get the job done we can have legislation ready to go on day one to save our planet and that is the political strategy that we are going in with but when it comes to the actual content of what a green new deal is all about what we need to do is get to 100% renewable and clean energy within 10 years the IPCC report says we have until 2030 for it to be done not for it to be legislated not for it to be drafted we have until 2030 to get the whole job done and so many people would think of a deadline like that as just a reason for despair a reason to throw up our hands and to say well it is not possible we are all going to die which is pretty much how a lot of people have felt in this presidential administration and what we are here to say is no we refuse to accept that as an inevitability we refuse to accept the current political reality which we know is not working for us and we know is not serving the majority of Americans and we know that we can get the job done ourselves and so a lot of this is comprehensive policy and there are really big bold ambitious ideas that are being discussed and I think that is the part of getting getting this job done we are talking about the potential of implementing a federal jobs guarantee so that we can put all people to work at a living wage and have their health care covered in the pursuit of switching to 100% renewable energy there are ideas being discussed on how we can get pay equity with child care covered with environmental cleanup with expanded industry for labor there are so many ideas at the table and we really need to convene these ideas to distill them and figure out what is workable in order to get our goals just yesterday I was able to meet with Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts and he established the first select committee on climate 10 years ago when the house was lost when we lost the house in 2010 one of the first things that John Boehner did was eliminate the select committee and so but before all of that happened Senator Markey who was then in the house established the first select committee on climate and what they did was that they built a trove of knowledge they built a lot of work and a lot of the work has already been done in terms of the nuts and bolts so we're not starting from scratch what we're doing is that we're picking up on a lot of the work that's been accomplished and we're really taking it to a next level making it much more aggressive but one of the things that Senator Markey told me yesterday was if we set the ambitious goalpost it will be met if we set it if it's realistic and when I say realistic I don't mean cynical watered down compromise I mean if it is possible within the scope of reality in terms of our capacity our ability to innovate our technology which is always so much bigger than we think it is if we push ourselves and if we push ourselves to really set goals that have not been set before it will be met and so we saw that when you know over 10 years ago we passed the first fuel economy bill since the 1970s for almost 30 or 40 years we set we set gas efficiency standards for cars to be 23, 27 miles an hour and the 20 something miles an hour per I'm sorry miles per gallon 20 odd something miles miles per gallon range and it stayed that way for 30 or 40 years there was little to no innovation done and you know 10 or 15 years ago when we decided to push that and we said you know what we need to increase these efficiency standards and we set the goalpost to be as ambitious as we could at the time what happened industry innovated and the goal was met and we right now have no choice we have no choice if we're going to survive if our children are going to survive we have to get this done it's simply the mandate of this moment and I believe and it's always been my belief that when this country when us as a nation have faced dire dire threats we faced them many times before we have always found the ability to really rise to that challenge we have innovated we have come together and we have really surpassed all political challenges in order to ensure our survival and also our thriving in the face of that challenge so we're really excited you know this is going to be intersectional legislation this is legislation that seeks to yes get us to 100% renewable energy yes protect our shores from rising sea levels but also to use that economic activity as an engine to introduce social and racial justice in the United States because it is so often and too often that the frontline communities that experience the the worst impact of what is going on tend to be black brown indigenous or poor and so it is unsurprising that some of the worst disasters with the most unjust recoveries have been in places have been in the aftermath of storms like Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans or Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico or with the water in Flint or you know or throughout this country and what we need to do is realize that when we legislate with the most vulnerable in mind that is our best way at guaranteeing comprehensive policy this is not about catering to a small sliver of the population this is about addressing the needs of all of us and leaving no person in this nation behind thank you very much thank you very much for that introduction thoughts or questions or comments from the floor you stunned everyone into silence except for Jeff was never at a loss for words and the microphone is coming to him we're thrilled where you are although we'd be more thrilled if you were here today but you are with us and thank you for the message and thank you for the boldness of course and the instruction to the group we are going to be a a national think tank of solutions and that's the purpose of this group which will be put in motion for many years can you give us a sense of what you hope would be a timeline to interact with the nation's universities when the select committee gets established how we might think about our own timeline so that we can calibrate on our end here I appreciate that question really the answer is as soon as humanly possible and one of the things that I think is funny when people say oh it's totally impossible for us to get 100% renewables in 10 years first of all I people said it was impossible for us to go to the moon within the span of one decade and we did it so I'm always skeptical of people telling me that certain things are impossible in the words of Mandela it is always impossible until it is done and the best thing we can try to do is to try to achieve the impossible and the worst thing that can happen is that we still get it done faster than what the reasonable expert said it will take so my answer would be to start coalition building as soon as possible my view on this is select committee or no select committee we will be introducing Green New Deal legislation in 2 years whether it is through an informal coalition of progressive members of congress or whether it is through the actual coalition of a committee this is going to get introduced no matter what and we need to start building those coalitions as quickly as possible and you know so I can say a year we should be seriously start drafting I can say by September but really the answer is if we try to start on day one that is the pace that the planet is really asking for us to do very clear and by the way one of the things when we discussed energy transition this morning we heard from a number of wonderful campuses about the dozens or hundreds of engineers that are on tap actually to do a lot of the heavy lifting of the analytics and the modeling we look down to New York City modeling in great detail you will find it fascinating every building in your district our colleague VJ Modi has the energy use building by building for every building in NY 14 and every other district absolutely so we are going to get this done but I think the urgency and the timeliness for the group is very very clear so we have another question President Cabrera and while the microphone moves I will jump in from the stage to the next question because your point about the goal in politics I am Daniel squadron I was a state senator in NY for nine years from the other two greatest counties lower Manhattan and Brooklyn which were the two greatest in those days and now run an organization focused on state legislatures called Future Now your point about politics the goal being more possible than people realize is so well taken it's impossible it's just every single step along the way that is and so if you could speak just a little bit because I think sometimes in this group there's so many great ideas that are so obvious the moment we're faced with them so compelling when we hear you talk about them but still so difficult how could it be that a select committee is even a challenge I mean you just made the case so brilliantly why would anyone I think we had a democratic majority in the house now why is that a challenge well you know it's uh you'd be surprised you'd be surprised that Congress is a profoundly human place as much as as much as media and talk about policy tries to make it seem as this very objective place where everyone checks their egos at the door very diplomatically and we always do the rational and correct thing it's you know we are in America and our democracy is a an experiment in flawed human beings engaging in self-governance and so I think that there are a lot of legitimate concerns in that there are a lot of people who have done a very comprehensive work already and they don't want to see that work thrown away so I think that there are very legit there's a lot there was a lot of legitimate resistance from there I think we've assuaged a lot of those concerns but there's also concerns over jurisdiction and people saying listen I've worked 20 years to chair a committee and now you're going to try to establish another committee that is going to take this slice of jurisdiction away you know I've dedicated my entire career to get seniority which is an issue that Democrats have by the way Republican the Republican party has term limits for committee chairs so their committee chairs rotate very frequently and they don't have to wait 30 years to chair or their entire career to chair a committee but this is a this is part of the Democratic Party rules and so you have people that feel like they put their entire lives into something and they don't want to feel like that work was done and that we're not and that we're starting from scratch and so one of the things that we're really working on and assuaging is that this is not about starting from scratch this is not about throwing everything away but this is about raising the bar and and I will say that I think we are winning I think we are gaining momentum just just about an hour ago or 45 minutes ago Nidia Velazquez came out in favor of the select committee on a Green New Deal she is the first incoming House committee chair to endorse the select committee which is a big big deal so we are now at almost 20 Democrats who have come out in favor of it and it just really speaks to the profound impact of inside out of an inside outside organizing strategy you know it's there's so many folks that come in and certainly after I won my primary there was this pressure of saying come on kid like come in you'll build your relationships you'll take 30 years and then you can be in a position where you can be very effective and we said no to that too because we don't have the time we just don't have the time and so we tried instead of working on building our relationships with instead of working on building our relationships inside the chamber we worked on building our relationships with national coalition organizers and to say hey listen I don't need to go golfing 30 times to get to curry favor with someone we just need to ask their constituents to ask them to hop onto this bill and they will and and that is the beauty of democracy and I think that that again is why it's so important for us to link everything together between the academics and the experts who know the goalposts and know how to get there to the frontline communities that will be able to pressure their elected officials to get it done and to say hey this is something we care about here in our homes it is possible is it wildly ambitious yeah but also you know I defeated a 4 million dollar 20 year incumbent and everyone told me it was impossible too but we can get it done we just need to commit to our community thank you and one last note one last note is that there's always this one of the big pieces of criticism that we always get and certainly that I always get because whatever with the media obsession and the right wing and whatever is that there is this idea that members of congress have to be everything in one person it goes to this like kind of weird false savior idea that we have about elected officials but we're not saviors we're public servants and I remember I remember when I was taking an economics an economics and public policy class when I was an undergrad and so often in these classes you really see this difference between what is optimal and what the actual law is and it's like oh geez like why is this profoundly inefficient rule the rule or why is this very suboptimal thing the actual law of the land instead of the optimal thing and I remember my professor said at that time he said listen as an economist as an academic as an expert my job is to tell politicians what is best it's not my job it's their job to get it done and I think it's important to acknowledge that because my job isn't to have all the answers on my own my job is to listen my job is to listen to you to get the plan about what needs to get done and it's your job it's part of your job along with organizers along with activists and advocates it's your job to figure out what the optimal plan is and my job to take that plan and get it done and I think that we've proven so far that we're pretty good or at least we have a knack for getting some things done but we there's no way that we're going to do it alone it's going to take all of us and I just thank everyone again in the room for being part of that army because that's what it's going to take when we have a global threat we have to answer it with the global ambition so thank you very much for that you do have a lot of folks here eager to be part of the network feeding ideas into the mix we have a question in the back do you have time for one more question we're going to ask each speaker as we go through the rest of the program to introduce themselves very briefly thank you I'm the president of George Mason University just across the river from your new home Bienvenida Washington I look forward to seeing you in our school just a quick question and I love the energy you're bringing to our neighborhood I hope you don't lose it one question any chance this may be a little naive that we can get at least some marginal bipartisan support of any Green New Deal legislation I actually think we can I do think that we can because what this is is the jobs bill this is a jobs and infrastructure bill and the way that we need to message this is the urgency of the bill is coming from the global climate crisis but a lot of the value and the importance of this bill comes from really what Senator Markey calls is a demand for a blue collar revolution what we are asking for is to put hundreds of thousands of roofers of electricians of steel workers to work this is a new deal this is a 21st century new deal and what we need to do is when we message that which has been the historic weakness usually in legislation like this but we are starting to make a lot of headway when we message this as a jobs bill this is a jobs bill first this is a community assessment bill first it is enormously popular and one of the things we are talking about is that frankly the president has no political ideology he has a media objective and personal objectives but he doesn't have a concerted political ideology just bill mckibbin was telling me five years ago he was signing a letter in support of climate change policy and so real climate change policy really when you have a party that is so governed by the whims of whatever the day is if we can control the day then we can control the win and I think that if we if we build the political reality and to really put it on republicans our first goal is we need to get it to pass the house we have democratic control of the house so now that we have democratic control of the house if we can get it to pass that chamber it is actually a lot easier than if we got control of the senate and didn't get control of the house because now that we got control of the senate we have a finite amount of senators that we are going to say that we can go to that are republican or more conservative democrats we can go and say are you going to vote against the jobs bill are you going to vote against the jobs bill are you going to vote against infrastructure and that suddenly changes the political calculus for them that is a lot harder for them to do than to say are you going to vote against climate change it is no are you going to vote against jobs and for those folks once we get legislation passed the house I actually think that there is a decent chance that we can build the political will and political pressure if we message if we are consistent about what this legislation really is Representative elect thank you very much for your support for the sustainability agenda congratulations again on your recent election and we thank you especially for your time this afternoon alright picking up where we left off Daniel could you tell us a little bit more it is an appropriate and painful segue for me but appropriate the same way we started talking about academia and facts and knowledge and global we just heard from just about the most galvanizing and inspiring person elected to congress in a long time with a real vision for this and now we will go from there to the exciting glamorous world of state legislatures but again it's painful you wouldn't want to do it in a class you teach but it is correct because a lot of what congress member elect was talking about there a lot of the SDG agenda and an agenda for sustainability and reasonable development over the next decade is going to be driven must be driven and can only be driven at the state level so you know we are trained and she said it so well we are trained to see individual elected officials as saviors they aren't when they are viewed too much as saviors you see the kind of cult of personality that has some very dangerous undertones in the white house and we are trained to see the federal government as more powerful than any other layer of government well for better or worse that is not really how the framers would have it and even today the state governments have this enormous ability to drive forward policies the policies that you see throughout the sustainable development goals and in fact I would argue there has not been a major federal policy since the 1970s that didn't start at the state level now remember those federal policies or the corporatization of politics and government are the reduction of meaningful or intelligent regulatory regimes but whether left right or center state governments or where federal policies start and whether or not they get taken up by the federal government they have an enormous impact when you look at the size of california's economy or you add up california and new york and florida say or illinois you are talking about major nation size economies and when you talk about structural powers they have clean new deal could be largely not fuel efficiency standards unfortunately but in many other ways largely driven at the state level certainly our education system is overwhelmingly driven and defined at the state level from early childhood through higher ed when you talk about some sort of other basic environmental health and health care issues you know obama care was romney care famously before it was obama care and before that actually i'm glad we have representative gabbard joining us it was actually hawaii care going back to the late 70s where they had largely figured out the challenge state governments are an enormously powerful and completely ignored node of influence not actually completely ignored that wasn't true and i need to be careful what i say in this room they are focused on quite a bit by narrow special interests narrow special interests that have a specific financial reason to focus on state legislatures when you go up to albany which i did and 148 or so miles from here it gets cold the architecture is strange but it's not empty the halls are full but they're not full of the people that congressmember elect ocasio-cortez was talking about the activists and the organizers and the academics they are full of the lobbyists for the narrowest special interests with the most to gain in a narrow financial sense we have left these nodes of influence and power to them and we have gotten the government that results from that not just at the state level but at the federal level today's dominant strain of politics was created as sort of a radical radical move in the 60's started in the halls of academia but it was pretty far out there it became mainstreamed in the 70's through a group called the american legislative exchange council and a number of other strategies focused on the state level well before ronald reagan brought it to the oval office if we want to achieve these goals we have to do at the state level so then the final challenge is how do you take the un sustainable development goals or that way of thinking how do you take really deep thoughtful work that's nuanced and sophisticated and apply it to state government well it's not as impossible as you might think we've actually tried to translate the sustainable development goals into something called america's goals and the reason to do that let's be honest there are some branding challenges when you're talking about local politics with some of these ideas but as we just heard and this is true and we've done the research to show it there is not a substantive challenge when you are talking about the electorate overwhelming majorities of the electorate true majorities of both parties and independence support this agenda the america's goals agenda which is sort of the specific wording that we've focused on but is really a reflection and translation of the sustainable development agenda it is extraordinary because you wouldn't know what you're hearing about politics power brokers the narrow special interests that fund politics are not who I'm talking about but if you want to go directly to the electorate there's no better place than state legislative districts where you can knock on nearly every door in order to win races or not knock on them to lose and it is the place that I believe this can take hold and it will be blocking and tackling clearing the field use whatever mixed metaphor you'd like for exactly the kind of federal green new deal we just heard about so Daniel I would just echo what you said about the opportunity at the state level I've just come from spending three years running Connecticut's department of energy and environmental protection and one of the things we got done was to launch the first in the nation green bank to radically ramp up the deployment of clean energy renewable power, energy efficiency in a range of other supporting technologies and infrastructure investments so I think you can see examples across the country where that kind of activity is paying off by the way six states have now followed Connecticut in developing green banks including the state of New York and about a dozen countries have so it's not only that we can influence the sort of development of policy across the nation we can actually shape it across the world. Can I ask was there big enthusiasm around national media attention covers of magazines that sort of thing? One has to be prepared to receive a reward for this kind of work at a different time and a different place but I think there are many in this room many of us who've chosen life in a university who don't expect adulation of the crowd and are eager and willing to do it just for the sheer sense of achievement that we put down a marker and signal the right way to go and you know we're lucky we're lucky in the world that there are people willing without that kind of personal credit to do the hard work so I thank you again all of you who are part of that think tank in support of sustainability that Jeff has described as network as being. Let's see if there's another thought comment question for Daniel as you might be able to tell I'm filibustering in support of Representative Gabbard getting here right here. Can you talk a little bit about this divide that we see in the urban and rural areas of our states and in the importance that we have on the rural parts of our states but recognizing the work that we have to do in the cities. Sure and North Carolina is a great example of it in fact just a election there that again reflected this divide almost like two states had elections in North Carolina and one side happened to be bigger than the other but you know the city's point is actually a really important one it's a little like the federal government point and you know and I would not sit up here and tell you the federal government's not important most because I want to have credibility with all of you not necessarily because I don't believe that that's somewhat true if not true certainly true relative to the kind of the conventional wisdom the level of focus resource and attention the reason the federal government gets so much focus and attention is its power is obvious I would actually argue that when you look at its obvious power a lot of that comes out of the Department of Defense that actually our vision of its power is social security and Medicare and the Department of Defense one of which are new policy issues and but nonetheless and with cities I think it's because the potential for visible action is just so clear you know you frequently you have governments that are more responsive partially because of a political, urban, rural and suburban increasingly divide partially because that's the work of cities cities are exciting places because they are delivering the services directly to the ones who are getting the solar panels installed and approving the certificates of occupancy for those new energy efficient buildings under building codes but let's remember cities are creations of states they are I mean literally as we know in New York City as I knew during my 25 minute delayed subway ride up here the services cities provide are a lot of them actually provided by states and even when they're not they are provided under rules regulations and corporations that are creations of the state so you know I think that the temptation to work with cities is important I know a lot of great work happens with cities and you know in my time in office actually because of where we were politically I found a lot more success myself even as a state official working with the city and pushing them you know partner two or three times a week about resiliency in my district and therefore around the city around New York City but we need to be able to have state governments that are taking this on partially because the city's strategy to the point you were really making I think leaves out rural communities when you leave out rural communities it's very hard to achieve these goals and certainly whatever goals you achieve you do in a hyperpolarized sort of broken or breaking democratic environment the first reason the second reason is states are where the power is and everything you want to do in that city you can do in the state everything you want to do in the state you can't do in the city and so I think it's really important despite the political challenges that come with it and just the unpleasantness of dealing with state government and state officials present company accepted it's really worth that work but it does require a reorientation alright further comments yes in the back thank you hi I'm Asma Latif I'm with Bread for the World anti-hunger organization based in DC it was really exciting to hear Alexandria talk about the 2030 deadline she was doing that in the context of the IPC report but as you fit engaging folks around that 2030 timeline what has been the reaction to that I mean does it seem does it how do people respond to that what do you associate it with is it the UN goals or is it goal setting in general and how how do people respond to that and then in a related question we've been you know engaging our domestic anti-hunger partners on the SDGs and it's really hard to translate the SDGs in two organizations that have not been familiar with the global context and not familiar with the MDGs and with limited bandwidth they're struggling with how do you adapt this framework and what is the value add of this framework to the work that they do so any insights you have on those questions so I was hopeful because Jeff was out of the room when you first asked I wanted to tell you a secret so he's not listening which is good so and this is around the 2030 questions important one in politics the idea of 2030 the idea of a decade from now is not what I would call a sword it's not what you lead your political attack with but I would say it's a shield because you know what the SDGs SDGs are and America's goals is sort of a simplified or distilled version of it are a bunch of targets that to the presentation we just heard earlier seem unrealistic the biggest issue you know I said they're very popular across political spectrums that's true I didn't say they were very credible across political spectrums in fact as you do public opinion surveys and you go from left to center to right from far left to left to center to far right in fact you see an essentially continuous line of decreasing belief they should happen by which I mean on the far left people say yes not only are these the right goals the only reason they haven't happened to date is political corruption and on the far right aside who has a different view of society and life and death but sort of the right or the moderate right the mainstream right yes these are the right goals this would be a better society but it's pie in the sky it's simply not realistic that credibility issue is the biggest one 2030 is an important shield on the credibility question here's a vision here's a set of goals that would be a better society 70 or upwards of 75 percent of people agree two-thirds of them say but it's not realistic and then you say by 2030 it is and they say aha if you lead with 2030 it feels irrelevant to people's lives right in politics really at the end people are pretty smart about their short-term self-interest in politics in my view and they're pretty good at sniffing out exactly what they're being sold and I would say that's even reflected in the 2016 election and you need to you want to offer them something that will impact their lives in the short term and is also credible 2030 does that second thing is the idea of the UN development goals international norms flies sort of like a lead balloon and but the idea of goals, outcomes and accountability, measurability is really appealing now measurability rubric with 17 metrics each on a 16-point scale is not appealing to people that's just sort of offensive and alienating but specific clear accountability and measurability that people can own themselves is a lot of the appeal of this and I think actually a lot of the genius of going back to the MDGs this whole concept that we'll talk about all moving in the same direction not about a litmus test to get to that direction and to your final question I think that translating them is critical in the American political context I think there are a lot of programs that have been seen to be elite or liberal or even democratic party affiliated all of these do not capture majority of the imagination of this country they certainly don't expand beyond the urban and suburban places that we're now doing okay into other more rural parts of the country so I think that's something that's sort of new and pure and not driven by an interest group so in the state context I talked about the special interests that has a bunch of elites and academics and behind it as opposed to the the same old interest groups even the ones we agree with the ones that we call partners when they're on our side and interest groups when they're on the other I think does have real appeal for folks and that's one of the pure things here this didn't come out of one of the folks who does have a financial interest in state government it came out of this sort of outside behind the curtain very deep analytic framework and I think that's actually helpful not harmful so Daniel thank you very much I think in the spirit of trying to keep the program on time and to ensure a full bit of time to discuss the future of our network which Jeff is going to lead us through will bring this part of the program to a close please join me in thanking Daniel and the representative elect as well I really thank you for having me I will never follow congressmember Acasio Cortes again so forgive me for doing it congressman congresswoman gabbard is on her way so it's just her meetings finishing and then making it uptown so she'll be joining us sometime in the next 20 minutes or so and in the meantime let's get started on brainstorming wrap up by 4 o'clock as promised what do you think what are we going to do let me put a few things quickly on the agenda and then open it up and roving mics for brainstorming first contact information we want to facilitate the networking we want you to bring in others who you think should be part of this other schools or other colleagues of yours or other departments that are really important somehow a quick note of some key places in the university key interests or capacities in your university that you want to really highlight we're really working on x this is something very exciting happening here we would love more networking on so and so we're ready to host a group to talk about this particular issue and so forth so I don't exactly know how to collect that information our team will be collecting that information with you and we will facilitate all of the intergroup contact so that we're not meant to be a filter or a valve or a blockade of the interconnections I want to repeat the idea of your schools taking on the challenge of organizing your states somehow for greater engagement and use the umbrella of SDSN to carry that that comes with certain help I hope and certain usefulness for the other schools that you reach out to by the way technically all your schools need to be members of SDSN so there is a membership process it's not an arduous one there is no financial commitment or anything that is a burden from a university senate or president or any other point of view but it's a registration process so that you're formally membership and just make sure that you get that part done and again Caroline and her team will be facilitating that couple of things that I would like to suggest one is that we have at least another we'll have many meetings but at least another New York based meeting in September for those of you who can make it the September 23 to 28 I think is the general assembly opening week there will be the SDG summit on September 23 24 but that's an inside the house operation of the UN so that's not an open thing for us but there's lots of interesting events going on around that because there will be about 160 or 170 heads of state coming specifically for that as well as for a climate summit that the secretary general has called so you'll find it interesting and we have normally as I said a two day conference international conference on sustainable development which is Thursday, Friday I believe somebody on our team who knows Thursday, Friday which is 26 27 anybody know get out your calendar I think it's the 26 27th of September I would recommend that we have an SDSN USA meeting around that time and then some side sessions you'll go to other things like the heads of state coming to say interesting things when they come up from the UN that day but we'll have our group meet one of those two days and we'll reserve this room or another room like it so we have an SDSN USA meeting but I would like other universities to be hosts of meetings either on specific topics of this group during the year or the following year and right now we're basically kind of on our own financial bottoms on this which is that SDSN will provide thanks to Jen Gross whom you met and other very generous supporters of this effort we do have our secretariat our team and operations but generally for meetings we're asking for hosts that can hold the local accommodations and so on on a local budget of some kind and that people travel on their own expense almost always in these matters so it costs something but it's not crushingly heavy and I hope people can make an offer to host such events and we will act as at least a clearing house to help facilitate that we want to add in more members because we absolutely were at 39 states represented among our founding group and I would like to get to 50 states for obvious reason and I think there are a number that said we want to join but the notice was too short and there won't be a problem in doing that but we will aim to do that and we'd welcome your suggestions and ideas and colleagues and why didn't you include so and so forth which would be enormously helpful in terms of what we should do as a group well first one more thing what we should do individually or in small groups think about the cases you heard about the city engagement or the state level engagement I will be happy to do what I can to help you in that and by the way when you want to have an event in your state capital to say our state really needs to get on top of that one of the things our network can do is help to provide some interesting guests or speakers or other suggestions that would be helpful for you and that absolutely is a core part of this you want to launch in your state and SDGs in your state process and it would be helpful to have people coming from around the country to say this is a wonderful thing and why it's important and some good examples that's what the network can do I guarantee it really interesting guests, speakers opportunities that's the fun part that Alejandro was talking about let's have fun with this and consider ourselves supporting and really pick this up and when you go to your mayor and if the mayor says I don't really know about this but what do you think we can get New York City, Los Angeles and others to directly call and say this is a good thing this has been really helpful for us and that's another piece of the connection also for you almost any place in the world where you would like links and where you're working and that to my mind is the greatest thing because everyone wants to make the connections and for our students we saw the wonderful internship programs that Glenn showed us phenomenal we have 900 members all over the world you want to do something name a country, we have a member there almost we're aiming for all 193 U.N. member states we're not quite there yet but that is also what we're aiming for but for most countries I'd say probably covering 95% of the world's population we're there and so that is another kind of service for us to routinely we would like to have a field program in such and such country do you have a good contact for us to why not because we probably do and I know most of the counterparts would be delighted to have that kind of contact I'd like us to do at least two things together I'd like to say again, I don't know how we're going to do it but I want you to volunteer and I want you to volunteer particular subjects that you're interested in because what we'll do is put on an eight week or ten week course where we're five minutes or ten minutes in front of the camera or organizing an hour session on a particular theme let's get that organized and play for it and so on that's not too expensive and we will get that solved I promise as a kind of core function but I love the idea of a course that all our students can take that is not about the SDGs that they can find but of course about the United States and the Sustainable Development Goals and other regions of the country and differences across regions and particular challenges in the arts of the country that we don't have but come on let's do that and then show our congressmen and senators and others as a teaching tool I think that that would be a nice thing to do second I would like a group of us and I hope that means all of us but it might mean some of us to work on essentially the Green New Deal or essentially the energy transition and to take up this challenge as a group because I do regard that as probably the issue that has the highest significance with the highest technical content with the most that still needs to be put on the table for ideas and realism and getting the job done and my suggestion is we are in December December 3 4 December 4 and I think we should say that we will have a report not the definitive everything but we will have a report by June on this issue so that we're not completely out of sync with the political cycle but I think what we heard is that if we have something by June we will be ready for some congressional hearings in the fall and probably the real work of details will be in 2020 in advance of the election cycle and so June will not be a final report but it will be a statement about the core principles and the regional aspects of the energy transformation and the accelerance of the energy transformation and that would be a great thing to do as a group so I'm going to ask you you have to volunteer for that to want to do that and to want to pull in other colleagues on that as well and we'll again be kind of mass communicating back and forth but I would like to put together a group so that we can say to Alexandria and to other congressmen and senators to Senator Markey a good friend we're working on this universities across the country and it is also the case you know it very very well and I want to emphasize something this is not a partisan effort obviously we're coming from all different political places locations, geographies alumni, boards students, everything there's no attempt to force anybody into anything uncomfortable that is for sure nobody speaks for anybody else in this also this is a voluntary organization so do not worry about getting waylaid or pulled into something uncomfortable you will not I promise but I do want to say I believe one of the greatest strengths of this effort could be that as universities we are not partisan and we speak to our local representatives and the representatives are going to be from both parties but wherever they are politically they are proud of your universities they have to be your core constituents for them but they are proud of their universities their children are going to your universities and they're wanting to build your universities so when you give them a message they will be responsive across the board and we have by the way a great excuse for me to shut up now because we have a fantastic representative congresswoman Tulsi Gavard here with us and I could not be more thrilled Tulsi thank you for joining us we just had Alexandria on the line talking a bit about the Green New Deal and you are awaited with phenomenal excitement and I again I want to say on behalf of all of us we're grateful for your leadership because it's very special in congress and we're very very happy that you're here Aloha you're right Jeff we are very proud of our universities and I know we have someone here from the University of Hawaii there she is welcome Aloha I hope your jacket is warm enough these are the things we have to weigh because we're not used to them I'm just so grateful to be here this kind of came about by happenstance I was just passing through New York yesterday I was supposed to be on a train a few hours ago but I saw Jeff last night and he mentioned what you all were doing and gathering here today and I was really thrilled to be able to come and just join the conversation I hear the day has been inspiring to be able to gather the best minds from across the country who are looking at our future the future of our country the future for our people and how we can make sure that it is one that is not only livable but that prospers there's nothing more fundamental to us as people than having clean air to breathe and clean water to drink and a safe place to live these are values and principles that bind us all together that transcend a lot of the differences in the divisiveness that we deal with in Washington and that often get in the way of making real progress on legislation and on these issues even though really at their core they're fundamental to our very existence and so as we look forward I see great opportunity there are great obstacles no doubt but there is great opportunity if we can focus on that existential need that we all have and that we all share in making it so that these priorities are at the forefront and look at the crises that we are facing today on many levels and how we must change we can ask ourselves those tough questions about how is the way that we live our lives impacting our today and our future how is the food that we are eating and where is it coming from and how is that impacting our today and our future the ways that we are working the ways that we are living in our society what this will require the kind of transformational change that we know that we need will require having very clear achievable objectives having a clear vision for where we want to go where we need to go as a country and having a real strategy to affect that change that both addresses are short term needs as well as what we know are the long term needs how to achieve that long term vision and then to make that investment of the necessary resources to execute this strategy and this is where having all of you come here today and what seems to be a bit of a historic gathering is so critical because this will require harnessing all of the resources that we have in this country harnessing the technology that we have in this country and keeping that focus and that discipline on where we need to go and how we need to get there I think one of the biggest frustrations in Washington these days is we are so reactive there's something new popping up every single day and you turn left and you turn right and you're reacting and you're reacting and meanwhile time passes by and we find ourselves much farther back much farther behind where we need to be and in a much deeper hole we are not making progress we're regressing coming from Hawaii for so many reasons I'm so grateful but one of them is that we have the opportunity to learn from the great lessons that have been shared with us by those who have come before us our indigenous leaders in Hawaii we would call them our kupuna those who in their lives lived in a very sustainable way thinking not just about how to feed their families and their children but how to live in a way that would sustain for generations they provide the model for us as we look at all the tools that we have available to us to develop sustainably but making sure that it's built on that foundation that they have laid down for us and in Hawaii this is called ahupua'a this is something that we've grown up in Hawaii and understanding that protecting our environment is not a conceptual thing it's not a political issue it's a way of life in Hawaii the ahupua'a consisted basically of a slice of land starting at the very top of the mountains and going all the way out to the shore and often following the boundary of a stream drainage these ahupua'a varied in size depending on the different parts of the island or the economic means of those places but really what it was is a belief that the land the ocean, the clouds and the rain that came were all interconnected and all provided the resources that people needed to live and survive and thrive the responsibility that we have to take care of these resources to utilize them not just for the sake of consumption but to utilize them based on the needs of our people and the needs of our society is the framework with which we need to see how we can rebuild our own future in Hawaii we have a number of initiatives that we've been working on most recently the Hawaii 2050 sustainability plan that seeks to do just that build off of the model that was set forth by those who came before us but use the tools available to us to make sure that our home is liveable and thriving and sustainable for generations to come we have our work cut out for us in Washington a lot more progress needs to be made and part of the problem the obstacle that we often face there is people on quote-unquote different sides of issues are not even willing to have the conversation again this is where as Jeff was talking about as I walked in where each of you have such a powerful role to play because you're not coming in the door with a partisan label that often says well you're not on my team so I can't talk to you or we have nothing that we share you already have that open line of communication that relationship that brings with it a lot of power and opportunity and influence to break things down into the basic needs in our communities that we share whether it is from Hawaii or from New York or from Missouri or Kansas or Alabama or any state in this country and that is a powerful opportunity that you can leverage for good to me these conversations have to start on what we in Hawaii call aloha which is respect love and care that we share and I want to close on a quote from Queen Lili Okolani about what aloha really is because to me this is at the heart of what we are all trying to do it is at the heart of this higher level of consciousness with which we are approaching how we need to live our lives and how we make sure that our future exists for the next generation Queen Lili Okolani said and wherever the native Hawaiian went he said aloha in meeting or in parting aloha was a recognition of life in another if there was life there was mana goodness and wisdom and if there was goodness and wisdom there was a God quality one had to recognize the God of life in another saying aloha but this was easy life is everywhere in the trees in the flowers the ocean the fish, the birds, the peely grass the rainbow, the rock all in all the world was life was God was aloha aloha in its gayatee joy happiness abundance because of aloha one gave because of aloha one had mana aloha had its own mana it never left the giver but flowed freely and continuously between giver and receiver aloha could not be thoughtlessly or indiscriminately spoken for it carried its own power no Hawaiian could greet another with aloha unless he felt it within his own heart if he felt anger or hate in his heart he had to cleanse himself before he said aloha during these times where we are seemingly surrounded by hatred and anger and disrespect and bigotry where there is such a lack of recognition of that which binds us all together Queen's words are a perfect reminder of our interconnectedness of that which we share which provides us with that pathway forward on how we can overcome these obstacles and bring that light of love of aloha to the forefront of our work thank you for your service and your leadership in building that path for everyone Mahalo an idea that came to mind in listening to the congresswoman is one thing we might think about in addition to getting together maybe choosing one day where all of our universities and colleges are having an SDG open house across the country and what we're doing is inviting the communities in the political leaders in the mayors the congresspeople in and that it is a kind of national discussion of these issues because this is something else that as a network we could do and that brought that to mind so if I could put that on our agenda for brainstorming as well I would like to suggest that so we have 17 minutes for clarifications and ideas discussion and the floor is open again please whoever has the mic let's hurry and I promise I'm not going to say very much or I'm going to try not to so thanks everyone for inspiring day I'm Jonathan London from UC Davis one of the things that seemed really important about the SDG process in other countries is this really rich collaboration between civil society and the academy and I think we've had some of that represented here I'd love to see for future steps even more of that to really think about that's business community which we have a little bit but NGOs, INGOs also a lot of emphasis in SDGs about youth leadership and really thinking about intergenerational connections that can be really powerful that sort of elder youth alliance and then I think just continued focus with Casio Cortes statement about movement legislation to think about how are universities connected to social movements and needing to still keep our objective rigor on the one hand but also this kind of open university community partnership I think would be a powerful direction thanks a lot hands up great Jeff, thanks again for the leadership and getting us organized just as Romander Andrew Cabera, George Mason University would love to host this group I think the Washington region for all the reasons that now are obvious would be a good place to meet so our house is your house the question about the global dimension you briefly mentioned it earlier just as you know we're working the context of APLEU the association of public and land grant universities we've created a network which is actually in the nascent stages but it's growing we have about 80 universities from all over the world dedicated to global engagement in the spot of that we see aligning our research and service missions with the sustainable development goals although our commitments go even beyond that into really favoring the exchange of people and ideas and students and so on by the way all the universities here are welcome to join the movement it's globally engaged universities there's a website the process of signing is also very very simple but the question and I look forward to exploring this also offline with Maria and Caroline and you but you thought that you may have about what is the global dimension of this and I realize how important it is the local connectedness of the goals but some of us are also very interested in helping students understand the connectivity of the goals on a global level thank you. Thanks a lot and very very briefly could we could we plan on an event either in the spring or fall where we meet at George Mason and then plan actually to fan out to Congress for example for discussions or use the base as the opportunity to have a meeting and an engagement with the Washington politicians I think that'd be fantastic so we'll follow up on that and then this is a global network so we'll connect our network is 900 members now probably significant overlap as we were discussing we'll figure that out but we'll figure out how to put these efforts to merge them or not merge them but connect them closely so that your effort is I hope given a boost by this and also more connections but we'll make that alignment work please yep and then we'll go around. Hi there Ben Packard with Earth Lab at the University of Washington and I'd just like to put a plug we heard about the importance of governors, mayors and CEOs and the global compact seems to be continuing to grow momentum in the corporate community and all of us to make this local need the relevance of the corporate community in our respective geographies so I'd love to hear in future meetings more about how we can work together and in sync with the global compact. Wonderful and just a very quick mention of that I mentioned this morning Jackie Corbelli she'll be working with the global compact and making that connection Lisa Kingo who directs the global compact close colleague of mine at the UN will make sure that that connection works and actually also helps to support business communities throughout the country and so it's a very good idea and we'll follow up on that. Hi I just I love all the work here and all the connections we've been making in addition to the policy work and the research I'd also like to encourage us to think about actual actions so projects we can do between universities and cities that are actually going to sort of further either what we're doing build the next generation of leaders are actually that prove out our methodologies. Do you have some suggestions you want to make right now? Cross-clinic ones like homelessness would be a particular interest but also Mayor Garcetti co-chairs the group of 420 climate mayors so if we wanted to try something very specific with all of the energy around climate I think that would be great. Great thank you very much. Helen Pickett Stony Brook University School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences this has been a very inspiring day and in the spirit of let no gold be left behind and being I think the sole person attending who works on the ocean I will volunteer my services over the coming year to help fill the gap in the US report. Wonderful. On oceans I also. Helen is one of the world leaders in marine ecology and in complex marine food chains and why unidimensional models of fisheries don't work and she gave me a great education in this many years ago and this is a perfect time to integrate this into the planning and thinking of this network. Thanks Jeff I also thought that maybe for the meeting in September SUNY Global has a great facility much closer to the UN and we could look into using that as a base for our conference it's on 55th in Lexington and I would love to work with those of you in New York on a New York based plan. Thanks. Thank you Wonderful. So I just wanted to reiterate the fact that all of this is going to need some funding so one of the things that I want to introduce yourself to everybody Yes, so I'm Maria from the US National Science Foundation but more importantly I'm actually from the Belmont Forum and that is a group of 29 other NSF like organizations that have come together to support inter and trans disciplinary research solutions oriented research we've had lots of different calls for proposals right now we have one that's open on ocean sustainability so have a look at that food security and safety is coming up so for the food security group but we are also looking at putting together a call for proposals in the next let's say 15 months or so that will focus on pathways and earth system targets for the SDGs so I wholeheartedly expect that this group will coordinate with their researchers in your universities to get them to work with their international counterparts to have fantastic approaches for this so I just want to say that there are groups out there that have heard this we're not, you know, we don't have the billion dollars yet but we are able to put things together and I do want to encourage you to not underestimate the convening power but the voice that you have to bring to your national funders okay, don't underestimate that that's a great idea thank you over on the other side of the room thank you Paul and then we'll go to the then we'll go over here thanks Jeff and also thanks to Maria and Caroline and Giovanni and your whole team for a very exciting day of conversation I'm particularly excited about the third element that you had mentioned in your opening remarks about the USSR having the convening power to support a political process in transition to sustainability I think that's where the biggest value add can be done and after hearing Ocasio-Cortez and Tulsi Gabbard I'm more convinced that this is the moment if we just create a network that is doing things in the sustainability field without a distinctive character we're probably going to not get noticed there are already at least a dozen that are floating around in my head people mentioned Ashi and Global Compact and you know the dozen so how do we distinguish this network in terms of its implementation power I think we need a focus and I think the focus could be we take Daniel Squadron his idea seriously then trying to do something at the state level or maybe have a few foci state could be one cities could be another maybe there are a dozen teams for dozen teams but I would be very interested because my university having 23 campuses across Pennsylvania is a natural place to implement SDGs in our campuses we are committed to it we are doing it we are bringing together a number of other local networks but we need support you mentioned the SDS and USA being able to draw new types of talents well I would like to see a structure that allows us to focus on these few themes and we would be happy to contribute to the state level implementation of SDGs excellent thank you very much this perfect ideas oh yes please Paul Perrin with the University of Notre Dame one of the activities that we've done with our students is as we present each of the SDGs is they start to articulate and identify not only the synergies between them but also the potential conflicts between them and I wonder if there isn't an opportunity for us I think that we ignore the tensions and the conflicts and the synergies between them at our own peril if we can't find a way to articulate these as an ecosystem and not as 17 individual goals and one way we might start to do that would be to start to do a more formal mapping we saw pieces of it but formal mapping of the tensions and the interconnections so that when we meet with decision makers we're not going in with idealism which I think is warranted in a lot of cases but in this case I think we really have to be able to help them think through the pros and cons and the different interactions there great thank you there are some good analyses of this which I'll both share and think about what that might mean for our group also please sure let's all be brief and we'll try to get all the comments in very brief Jean Morse University of Buffalo representing the SUNY Global Health Institute just two quick things from NIH perspective I think the Fogarty Center has a really nice model of trying to figure out how to bring together academics with government with communities through their application process because you can't get funded unless you bring all of those together I think in the US we're not as good at that and the other thing is that the NIH has re-engineered all of clinical research through the clinical and translational science institutes making implementation which is really the thing that's been staggering for example most clinical trials don't enroll people to study what we're trying to study so they reorganized everything very good models there through NIH I think will complement the NSF perfect thank you please Clayton and then 1, 2, 3, 4 and that 5 and then that will finish it no more hands thanks professor Clayton for our executive director of ideas for us in your opinion what is the number one thing that we need to collectively accomplish by 2020 in order to achieve the goals by 2030 the clarity of what to do by far the actual what to do not the motivation for doing it not why it's so important but the actual what to do this is what is fundamentally missing and this is fundamentally what serious science, engineering, implementation science is about the actual what to do okay John O'Keefer from Auburn University Alabama the proudest things that Auburn University does is we have this international quality of life award that was launched back in 1994 in conjunction with United Nations international family of the year actually as a matter of fact yesterday evening at the United Nations some of the individuals who have actually worked so hard to promote the quality of life at the global level were recognized yesterday so for the past 25 years we have been doing that one and we are very proud of that I thought that would be a good practice for other universities phenomenal thank you very much and we'll make that known when we get our website up and I think that should be featured and explained please who's next? one, two and then one, three three more okay thank you I'm Tim Jockner from University of Cincinnati where I've just taken up the deanship of the college of design, architecture, art and planning and I notice there are at least a few others from the creative professions broadly defined on the fringes here I noticed a few on the fringes of the Habitat Conference in Quito in 2016 we take part in these UN events but I think it's I would like to encourage those in these professions to help move our professions a bit more to the center of the discourse there's a lot of knowledge coming from the scientific from the economic from the political directions I think the design professions broadly defined as going from art through design architecture to planning have potentially a lot to contribute to this so anyone immediate invitation introduce yourself to me before leaving the room but I would be very interested in being a part of this in the long term fantastic one thing we'll do is suggest some thematic groups and thematic efforts for people to indicate participation in those we had a long discussion yesterday with some wonderful architects actually coming from France about exactly these issues also so we said we would try to have a conference in the spring on urban design quality of life and probably in New York but we'll also try to get a thematic group around this idea for the US yeah please thank you very much for a wonderful meeting I learned a lot from both listening to people around listening to people at the table but also talking to people during the meetings I wonder if it's possible to organize a significant part of the next meeting around ideas that come from people who are in the room and that they submit as things on which to act because there is so much knowledge and so much experience in this room it would be a shame to not benefit from it during our next meeting and to organize a significant part of the event around what people here would like to do wonderful and again I hope we can use a website and active contact so that we're not waiting between meetings but we're actually brainstorming actively and I think final speaker so please Hello I'm Vera Mitzner from the National Council for Science and the environment I'll be very brief so we are a Washington based non-partisan not-for-profit organization and we advance informed political decision-making on environmental issues through science so we have around 100 universities in the US as our members and many of these universities are representatives of these universities are in this room today I just wanted to underline that we are a great resource and very happy to ally with you and anyone here because we talk to policymakers and we talk to researchers and we really work hard to establish this bridge so that's our mission and you can please come to talk to me if your university is not a member or you want to engage somehow thank you very much ladies and gentlemen we've come to the end of a marvelous opening day I feel like we have a lot more to discuss and a rich agenda I apologize for not having as much discussion as we need but we packed in a lot today it's only the beginning people traveled a long way and I'm really grateful for that I hope you feel that it's something exciting to continue I'm very very excited myself about what we're going to do together and I look forward to the very active continuation we'll figure out how to use all virtual means to keep us connected in between the real gatherings when we are together we have a person we have a date in Washington we have another date in New York we have invitations in other parts of the country we have the launch of the Mexico network in March for those of you who may have particular interests or desires to be present there I would like us by next year to produce a MOOC I would like us next year to produce a MOOC I think maybe next year let's say not maybe let's aim to produce one national SDG day on our own campuses if we could aim to do that next fall probably in a year's time but all across the country that this is put on the agenda and ladies and gentlemen I apologize for finishing three minutes late but thank you very very much safe travels home