 It's still... All right. Okay. Sit down. Thanks. It's a sort of heritage from Linneas in Sweden. It's interesting that some of them who stood up, they didn't stand up when I said, are you a biodiversity expert? I don't think if you know hundreds of species, come on. Yeah. I'll call you an expert. Okay. Thanks. Then we know you a little bit. Okay. So we will have the two respondents. And please, Lisa and Schultz and Alexander Antonelli, could you please join us here on stage. Okay. So, Alexander, you are a professor in Systematics and Biodiversity from Gothenburg University. And you are also the director of the... Let me see if I get this right. The Gothenburg Global Biodiversity Center. I love your center because you have 13 different partner organizations and you work not only with a sort of science, but also with education and preservation and public communication of biodiversity science. I wish we had something similar here in Stockholm. Let's fix that afterwards. I know that there are many experts here. You are also a Wallenberg Academy Fellow and you're a member of the Young Academy of Sweden, et cetera. You have a long CV. So you will be the first respondent. Give him a big applause again, please. And I will give Alexander like seven minutes, but let's say something about Lisa first. Lisa, you have a PhD in Natural Resources Management from Stockholm University. You're one of the theme leaders at the Stockholm Resilience Center here at Stockholm University, where you deal with biosphere stewardship. I think you will talk more about that soon. You have been an expert member in the UNESCO Men in the Biosphere Program Strategy Group and worked a lot with biosphere reserves, which is part of the UNESCO Men in the Biosphere Program. You have also worked a lot bridging science to policy and science to business and even started a foundation to make sure that businesses move in the right direction. So big applause for Lisa as well. So seven minutes to Alexander, seven minutes to Lisa, and then of course, Camille, you will be able to respond to the responses. And then I will gather some questions from the audience and then we'll see what happens basically. So please, Alexander, the floor is yours, or if you want to be having the floor from here, perhaps. That's fine. Do we have a clicker or can I be the human clicker otherwise? Please. OK, so thanks very much, Tritik, for the kind introduction. I feel the pressure on my shoulders now. And thanks so much, especially to Professor Parmesan or Camille for the fantastic talk. I think on behalf of everyone here, it was an amazing synthesis of such a complex and important topic for our society today. And I'm so happy that this subject is actually a focus of today's lecture because we've been talking about climate change for many years now. But by the verse, it's just as important a topic and one of the major societal challenge. I'd like to follow up in your talk in terms of understanding what will happen to the future, because I think that's something that concerns all of us in our future generations as well. And we all know that it's extremely difficult and complex to foresee and predict what's going to happen in the future. I'd like to bring in another perspective because we are sharing this planet with about 7 or 8 million other species, not including bacteria. And that's an amazing biodiversity. You can spend your whole life in the jungle looking for new species and you won't be able to make it. And but we also have to realize that although we have this amazing diversity on this planet, it's only about less than 0.01% of all species that have lived on this planet before. So most species have already gone extinct. And my question here that I'm going to focus on is what can we learn from the past to better understand the future? And I'll just show you a couple of examples. This is a study looking at ferns. And you see some ferns here just in front of the speaker where we're speaking, Camille. And if you think that ferns are boring, you're wrong. Because they are one of the most exciting and one of the best survivals of all organisms on this planet. They've been around for about 400 million years. They're much tougher than any dinosaurs or mammals for that part. And ferns have been diversifying, creating new species, but also dying out at an amazing pace. And in this graph here, we show some of the fossil and living relatives of ferns. And here you can see in a timescale from today, 0 up to 400 million years ago, how different lineages of ferns have diversified. And some of them were very, very diverse in the past. And then nowadays, we just have a few species left. And we can also see that from looking at DNA trees, so evolutionary trees, which compare how different species have speculated through time. And the question we can see here is, how has extinction taken place among ferns or any other organism? And this graph just shows how the extinction rates of ferns have changed through time. And this is a timescale, again, from 400 million years ago up to the present. And here, how many species have gone extinct? And what we can see here is very large variations. So the question that we can be posing, it's what's driving those extinctions. And one of the things, when you compare many different factors, of course, is that temperature is one of the main drivers of extinction among ferns, the other one being in interactions with other plants, in this case, gymnosperms. So what we can see here is that temperature does have a very substantial effect. And basically, it's something that has gone on for hundreds of millions of years. In another study, where we're looking at plants in South America, where most of my research and that of my group is focused, we've been studying how speciation and extinction varies through time, and what's the relation to temperature change. And what you can see here is the temperature curve for the last 15 million years. And this is the extinction curve for the same group of plants. It's about 600 species, amazingly beautiful plants in the Andes of South America. And what we can see here is a very strong correlation between temperature change and extinction. So my last slide is showing a bit of a complex figure, but you don't have to focus on the details. But what it shows here is one of the most comparable events of climate change that we had in the past. You have to go back as far as about 56 million years back in time, just after the dinosaurs died out six, five million years ago. And during this time, temperatures rose about five to six degrees in a period of about 10,000 years. So it was much faster. We know the scale is really the big difference here, but it was a global warming that we haven't seen before. And what happened here is that this part of the graph shows all the different kinds of pollen you had before the warming. And then the red line here shows the period of warming, global warming. And then everything afterwards is what happened afterwards. So what you can see here in this transition of 56 million years ago, a very long time ago, is that we have a whole bunch of species that were very common before the warming and decreased. But we even have some many species that actually just appeared out of nowhere, the light blue ones, and those that increased in abundance. So the number of individuals of species for time. And there was a fourth group which didn't really care about the climate change. So what we can see here is a complex picture showing that it's been a very different impact of climate change, and there were winners and there were losers. So finally, I think that what I wanted to convey with those lines is that organisms, different groups of plants and animals, they have responded very differently to climate change. And that's something that really conveyed very well, Camille, by showing that some species were actually not moving towards the poles, but actually down the hills. And we really have to understand this complexity in predicting the future. But then my second question is, what can we learn from the past and sometimes the deep past, millions of years ago, to better predict the future? So that was the question, the question to you. Thank you. Thank you. I think we will actually sort of wait for you to respond to that question and listen to Lee Sinford. So keep that thought there you had and sort of wait for Lee Sinford's response as well. And then we take it from there. Lee Sinford, please. Thank you, Fredrik. And thank you, everyone, for this afternoon, especially you, Camille, for a fantastic presentation. I learned a lot already and I look forward to our shared discussion. I will take a different entry point to complement your perspectives. But I first want to say that I bring with me the advice to one, go wild and to go to the pub. I think those two are really good advices that I'll take from the professor for the weekend, at least. And linked to that, I think what you do is that you find a way of conveying this message to people. And people are actually the ones who will have to act on the information that you're providing and the knowledge that you're providing. And you said that you wanted this talk to go from the sense of doom to a more hopeful message on where you can actually act. And I think a big conclusion that can be drawn from your research and the presentation today is that we also need to add humans into the picture to make science really work for action. And so at the Stockholm Resilience Center, we have this focus on social ecological systems and that's a concept that tries to convey that, that all ecosystems today are actually shaped by human actions, but also that all humans are dependent on the ecosystems. So we are really interconnected and we have to find ways of studying them as a whole. We also, I think you also show very clearly how the local is linked to the global and how there are no places today that are isolated from what's happening on a global level in terms of warming, for example, which means that when we address conservation, we need to think about how to do this at multiple levels and engage from the local practitioner to the global policymaker. So the social ecological systems, the connection across scales and then the complexity and you told this story about how the climate scientists think they're so complex and then you add life into the picture and it becomes even more complex. But then of course, if you also add humans into the picture, it becomes even more complex and you need to find ways of understanding both how the ecosystem evolves and how people are motivated and able to take care of the ecosystems. And that brings me into the concept of Biser stewardship and it's a field that we've worked on for the last few years and there was recently a paper coming out from the center that tried to look at what stewardship actually is and it's a combination of care, knowledge and agency. So it's about caring for a place and it's species and biodiversity. It's about the knowledge of knowing what these species need and then about agency, so the capacity to act, so to have regulations in place and funding in place, et cetera, that actually enables action on this care and knowledge. And what my question, what I would like to discuss more is how we improve that when we, or how we maintain stewardship and motivation for stewardship and capacity to act when we take that leap from the local to the global because when you look at what people are motivated about, it's not only the ecosystem services and the rational reasons because that we get food and pollination and water and all these things that are important, but it's also a motivation connected to sense of place, to care for this area that you grew up in and so on. And also the fascination that you connected to with your friends, the love for these specific species. So how do we maintain stewardship when we take that leap from the local to the global? Thank you. So definitely moving between scales here. What can we learn from the past and sort of the science on what how species reacted to climate change in ancient times and also going from the local to the global and maintaining that sort of level of stewardship and actually making people care about the global whole. Thank you, challenges. No problems. But I loved your bringing in the paleo aspect and one of my thrills with moving from a traditional biology department to a geology department at University of Texas at Austin is that's where the paleo biologists are. And we have these kind of conversations all the time. What can we learn from past major climate changes? And I think one of the difficulties is they are all a little bit different because the CO2 levels, the ocean currents, where the land masses are, it's, you know, you can't quite make a perfect analog of the next few hundred years in any, you know, past way. So you have to kind of look, it's not easy. We can learn some lessons, but at least I don't know anyone who's found the perfect analog for the coming few hundred years. It would be great if we could. But so what lessons can we learn? Well, we look and learn a lot. We can learn that with small amounts of climate change during the Pleistocene, you had glaciers covering Europe versus now. So that's, you know, to us, that's a big climate change but in the grand scheme of things that actually is relatively small. And we know that you don't lose, you don't have a lot of extinctions. If you keep it within that sort of window, you tend to get a lot of movement of species around the globe, community reshuffling, but you don't tend to get a lot of extinctions. But if you shift greater degrees than that, before we went into the Pleistocene, which is a cold earth, we had a hot earth going back say four million years. And when we went from that hot earth down to this sort of general cold earth, we did have large numbers of extinctions. So I think one thing we can learn is yes, life, biodiversity can handle some fairly big shifts, but there's a limit, you know, you get over that limit, you have a massive extinction and it takes about what, three million years, four million years before you start really seeing a new diversification of life. So as a conservation biologist, I have many hats. So as a conservation biologist, I think, oh, I don't want to see my butterflies go, right? I'm, you know, I love them, they're beautiful. I want my nieces to have the experience of snorkeling in a tropical coral reef. And we're losing that ability pretty rapidly. And I literally am telling them, look, you're for your Christmas present, I'll give you a trip to a tropical coral reef, but go see it now because in 10 years, it may not be there. And a lot of the reefs I used to snorkele in are no, they're all bleached. They're no longer any good. So that immediacy is you don't want to see these losses in your lifetime or in your children's lifetime. And to prevent that, we need to keep below 1.5 degrees centigrade, which is only another half a degree. We've already had one degree. It's only another half a degree. We start getting above that we lose, our children lose the experiences that we had when we grew up of the kind of walking through a forest, going through, going on a beach and snorkeling. Those experiences will not be possible if we get above two degrees for many of the systems that we love. So I think there's, that's one thing to keep in mind, but the other thing I think that the lesson we learn is life will be fine on earth. We may be going into another mass extinction event, but the earth has recovered from many mass extinction events. It takes a few million years, okay? But it recovers. It's humans that we need to worry about. And that's what I think a lot of the people making policy don't get. All right, I'm coming, I'm giving, I'm a conservation biologist. I'm telling you about the biodiversity, but really in truth, I'm far more worried about humans, my children, grandchildren, than I am about life in the big picture because we know life will continue, life will evolve. Life has an amazing capacity to bounce back from massive extreme events. So this comes back to the motivation point that Lyssen was asking about perhaps, how do we motivate people to care about the global scale in that sense? Not only talking about what we will lose, but actually what we can gain if we invest in natural capital and the kind of ecosystem services we get back. Yeah. Any responses to the response to the responses? Alexander? Of course it was a very good question. I think there are several challenges in terms of the synergy of effects, both when it comes to climate change, but also habitat loss and other pathogens, invasive species that we haven't really had any equivalents in the past, but also think it would be a pity not to look into the past because those events have happened before and I just wish that there would be a bit more integration of evolutionary biology into the conservation that we're facing now in the future. So yeah, I fully agree with you. It's a very complex task, but also think we should be looking into the past a little bit more perhaps. Yes. No, I agree with you. I think the conference, we need to have more joint conferences. Instead of, you know, you go to your conferences, I go to mine and I talk to you on stage, you know, it would be good to be talking in the pub. In the pub a little better. Yeah. Yeah. And listen, that's very similar to what the Stockholm Resilience Center is trying to do, the transdisciplinary meeting across disciplines. So yeah. Any response to the response of the responses? No, I think that just as we need the diversity of life for the resilience of our biosphere and our life support systems, we actually also need this diversity of perspectives and knowledges because we all have pieces of the puzzle and then there needs to be even more work, I think, around how you have that deeper meeting between the different both disciplines and, you know, focus on times and species and geographies and so on so that you can truly learn from each other. Well, I did want to make one comment on that is, so everyone knows we need to be multidisciplinary, it's really hard. I mean, I have done it. So my first big meta-analysis of global impacts of climate change was done with an economist and that paper developed out of IPCC arguments, to be honest, we were arguing about what's the bullet we're gonna put in the summary for policymakers and I wanted to say we have high confidence that climate change has already impacted wild species and the other two biologists who are on the team and the economist said, oh, you can't say that. You know, you're cherry picking, you know, it's all correlational, da, da, da, da, da. So it was hard and literally we go in the evening and start drinking and it's like, okay, we're gonna talk about something else and you talk about something else and finally about two in the morning, it gets around to so how come you think you can talk about impacts that way? And it took two years for that paper to develop and it wasn't the putting together data, that wasn't the data. Okay, so that took a couple of months. The two years was actually are going back and forth talking, and it was before Skype so we had to like talk on the phone and see each other and before we could actually come up with a set of texts we could agree on and it's a lot to give and take. A lot of, okay, I understand now, I understand your viewpoint but this is why I don't think we should have that in the paper and you have to like each other. You have to not just respect each other intellectually. You have to like each other because you're saying, yeah, everything you've learned all your life is maybe not quite right. Yeah, it's hard. And so these transdisciplinary conferences, I think that's a great start but you need the conversation to be much more long term than that, you need to have an ongoing dialogue one on one with the same people so that you get to know each other. I had to learn economics. He had to learn ecology. I mean, literally it's like, okay, tell me, what is capitalism? How does this work? It's so interesting because we have a long history in this house of people working together from ecology and economy. So the Bayer Institute of Ecological Economics and you mentioned Paul Ehrlich, who has been part of that as well and it's connected to the Stockholm Environment Institute and actually a part of the Stockholm Resilience Center. So that kind of collaboration is challenging but extremely important. It's extremely important. For scientists that can really have an influence on policy. But you have to really want to do it and you have to be highly motivated and you have to just say to yourself, I am gonna make this work because if you're kind of being a bit lazy and expecting it to just happen, uh-uh, no. We have a strategy to bring them out on an island and Bas Holling, who is the father of the resilience, the father of resilience theory, Bas Holling, was talking about scientists who are good on islands, island people that can actually come together on an island and collaborate across disciplines. So that's perhaps an advice. He said they laugh hard and they work hard. Yeah, good. So we need some questions from you guys in the audience and there's a microphone somewhere or two microphones, one microphone. So raise your hand and we'll see if we can gather three different questions to the panel. Anyone? Don't be shy. Here, we start with Louise. Thank you so much, all three of you. Can you hear me, yeah? So I wonder if you were talking about agriculture, but I'm directing the question to all of you. So what do you think is the single most important policy measure that we need to take right now within the agriculture and food industry to address conservation and biodiversity issue? These single really good ones. See if we can get two more questions and think about your responses. It's an easy one, right? Yes. Thank you for the talk. Right, so there's about, sorry, maybe take the next one, I'll come back. Okay, another question then? Yes. So please say your name and where you're from. Okay, my name's Adam Porter. This dealing with the public even the issue between the biologists and the economists and putting your paper together, there seems to be an ignorance, well, an ignorance mountain or a knowledge gap or something between your worldview and theirs. Ultimately the policy is going to end up going through the public. And so it seems like there's probably a bigger knowledge gap that needs to sort of be education gap that needs to be surmounted. And how bad, what's that gap really look like? How different is the public view and what do we need to be able to teach the public to even to be able to put the questions in context for them? Okay, thanks. So do we have a third one? Are you ready now? Yep, sorry about that. So I was wondering about the sort of, is there a conflict between preserving biodiversity and preserving human society? If we've established that humans are ultimately what's at risk and life will go on without us. And if we're trying to keep people around, like the farmers in Germany who are using this hey technique that's devastating for biodiversity. I mean food security is an impending issue as well. And they're probably doing that for some productivity reason, you know, some efficiency reason. So how is that a false dichotomy or is there a conflict between preserving human food security and the security of human society versus preserving biodiversity? Okay, thanks. Oh, some huge questions here. And we had the first one about the single most important policy measure to sort of deal with the food and the biodiversity conservation. Yeah, that's one of them. The other one was about the ignorance gap or the sort of public view and the scientist view and how bad is that gap and what can we do about it? And the last one was about the major conflict between biodiversity conservation and humans. Is there one? Since two of them are about agriculture, I'm actually gonna talk about the education one first because this does come up and I've given talks to high school teachers, you know, people in the business of educating children and we talk about it and they're like, well, we have to teach them math and language, English or Swedish or whatever, you know, we have to do that. And yet it seems like we need to be teaching them environmental science at an early age when they're like 10 years old. So what, you know, they say, what we're supposed to now be teaching them everything, you know, from age five, how can we possibly do this? And so it is a real problem. There's no super simple answer, but the teachers I've seen who are being really successful with young kids like eight, nine, 10 year olds are they're teaching them the math and the English and the, you know, the basics, but they're using part of the day to sort of have, say, a little herb garden or a biodiversity garden. One school is into traditional pecan trees in Texas are going extinct, the very traditional varieties, the native varieties, and they plant pecan trees out. So what they're doing is they're doing practicals, so kind of laboratory type stuff, that by doing it, you're training them in the connectivity between human society and the environment. What benefit do we get from a healthy environment? How do we preserve biodiversity? Rather than sort of making it class lecture. And that's where I think it's really working. It's the fun time. It's maybe open on Saturdays and it there and the kids are really learning it. So I give the kind of lecture I've given today to 10 year olds and their questions are brilliant. You know, I get them saying, well, so aren't humans just gonna go extinct? I'm like, ah, how am I supposed to answer that? And the kids can handle it better than we can. They're like, right, okay, we gotta get on board. This looks like we're gonna go extinct. We better do something about climate change. Okay, you be a politician, you be president. You can go for it. So they can handle complex thinking at a very young age and it really just, I think it's a practical matter. How do you give them their basics but also start giving them some of this, you know, environmental science, education, maybe not in a gentler way than when you're older. So I think it can be done, but I'm not saying it's easy. So. I think that Alexander has a sort of comment on that as well because you're into education with your biodiversity center. Yeah, exactly. So for instance, tomorrow I'll be teaching 450 teachers, teacher students in Gothenburg. And I'm actually surprised every time I do that because they're only like three or four people who know anything about biodiversity among those 150 students. And I must say that for instance, in the Swedish context, the only requirements in the curriculum between year one and six at schools, at Swedish school kids, they have to learn a few species and it doesn't specify how many species. It doesn't specify in which way they should know about species. And back to your question, Fredrik, how many people here would stand up because they know more than 100 species? It's not a representative part of society. So you really have to know that. And it's a bit scary when we think, everyone supports biodiversity. That's a good thing. We have to fight for it. But very few people really are able to identify teleparted different species in nature. And I think it's something that we really have to work together with our kids, our society, and our curricula at schools as well, requiring a higher level of understanding what biodiversity is and how to identify species. Because if you don't know anything about species, you won't be able to protect them. And listen, I know that you try to train business people. Is that tougher than training the 10-year-old? Well, we'll see. It happens in November for the first time. But what I think has been quite clear is that you have to use a different language if you're talking to policy makers and business people versus if you're talking to kids and citizens. But also that policy makers and business people are also humans. So actually the care and love for nature and life and biofilia and so on is there as well, deep underneath this quite rational surface. But I wanted to also add the importance of thinking about how we treat our human urban nature. Because that's where most kids today actually get their interaction with species. And we have studies showing how important it is for kids to have a small urban park nearby your daycare is going to change a lot how you think about nature. And it doesn't have to be super biodiverse, spectacular. But to have some trees, some bushes, some insects, some plants makes a huge difference. Did we have anything on the single most important policy measure within agriculture? Anyone want to tackle that one? Well, I'll speak to both questions. I think they're really both about agriculture. Modern agriculture has been wonderful for increasing yield and that's adding fertilizer, new hybrid seeds that have higher yield. And it's been wonderful for increasing meat production. Lots of feed for cattle and sheep and pigs and whatnot. But we are already starting to see the downside. So increasingly insects are becoming insecticide resistant. This is now a big problem. It's something that's been around a while and ecologists have been warning about it for a long time. But it is now a big problem that you've got, you can throw on as, so farmers are throwing on more and more insecticide. It's like, that's not really the solution. So we have to do something different in terms of pesticides. With climate change and sort of the typical way of doing modern agriculture, which is so modern varieties are selected very strongly for yield. The way that they can get high yield is that you give them plenty of fertilizer. You keep the pest off. So you're putting them in a bubble. You irrigate them. You're putting them in this bubble where they've got lots of resources. And then you can select genetically for these very, very high yields. It turns out that those same varieties are very vulnerable to climate change. So what is happening now is geneticists are inputting genes from the wild related species into say tomatoes, et cetera, to be able to create hardier varieties, varieties that are more resistant to a more variable climate year to year. Variability is increasing, both in temperature and in precipitation. And yield goes down, okay? You can't have it all ways. So in order to get crops, even if we're just thinking of feeding humans, even if we don't care about biodiversity, we are gonna have to start developing crops that have more genetic diversity, are more hardy able to handle these climate extremes that are increasing every year and able to be more resistant to pest on their own without relying on massive insecticides, massive pesticides and resistance to rust and mold and all the other things that attack plants. And we're having to do that anyway, right? Just to keep the human production up because the kind of selection we've done has created really weak plants. They're not very healthy, if you wanna think of it that way. They need too much pampering and we can't pamper them anymore because now all the insects have evolved to deal with the insecticide and climate change is causing extreme years everywhere pretty much. And so in order to keep human global food up, we need anyway to go to more sustainable agriculture, I would argue. And then on top of that, so the hay meadows with the rolling, the hay up in the plastic, one reason they do that is because it starts a fermentation process and fermented hay gives you bigger cows. You get greater growth of your cattle. Well, I'm from Texas, I know cattle. Maybe it does, it was sheep and goats too. But for cattle, you get better growth. You get better yield from your cows if you feed them this kind of semi-fermented hay. But at the same time, if you're thinking sustainable feeding, I'm not against eating meat. I think actually, you know, we are evolved to eat meat as human beings, but getting balance into our diet with having the little bit of meat that we need to be healthy, we can do with traditional agriculture, traditional ranching without having these modern ranches where they're fed fermented food and kept in barns and just, you know, fattened up basically for the slaughter. So we don't need to produce anything like the amount of meat we're producing globally in order to have healthy populations. And so you could do away with the plastic packaged hay have just traditional ranching methods where you have either grazing or traditional hay meadow cutting. We'd still raise plenty of meat for global populations to be healthy. And it would be less than we have now, but you'd have a much more sustainable agriculture. So I think all of this is doable. So eating less meat, being a flexitarian that somebody calls it and going for some diversity that is actually lost in the sort of practices we have in industrial agriculture is also, we can learn from the past here as well because there are all varieties out there that we have forgotten that are often more resistant, that we can bring back in again. So using biodiversity in this sense as well to reduce the need for chemical inputs and also increase resilience to climate change. Good, thanks. All right. We soon need to sort of round this up. There's going to be a coffee break and it will be from quarter past three and we will reconvene again at 3.45. But before that, I think that we should soon thank the panel of course, but there's another panel after the coffee break. They will talk even more about sort of how to bring it to practice and policy. So do you want to send a question to the second panel? I'll ask all three of you. Listen. I can begin. So I'm wondering if this panel could address how you actually communicate the complexity and the system that we need to address. So communicating that when we only focus on carbon sequestration and cutting emissions and then replacing fossil fuel with biomass fuel, for example, without addressing biodiversity, we run a risk of actually not being able even to address climate change. So we need to have the capacity to think about when we grow something here that we actually both quit the sequestered carbon and provide all these other services connected to this land. So how do we communicate and address the system's perspective and identify the trade-offs and synergies between these different goals that we have? Small question. Are we ready for that, Tobri? Okay, Alexander. I'm very curious to hear if there are any ideas about how to raise the topic of biodiversity to the same level of importance as climate change. Great, thanks. Incoming, the last word. Yeah, I'm very interested in hearing about, I mentioned a couple of things that we can do as individuals, but I would really like to open it up to other ideas or things that what do people think is feasible to encourage individual citizens to do and what do they think is really not going to work? So what are the workable solutions from an individual level? Thanks. So, big hand for the panel. Thank you. Thanks. Thanks a big thank you. There's going to be a round of something, Annelie, Sambin will come up here with something, I think. Even more, thank you to the panel. More applause and big hands and... So, coffee break. Be back at 3.45. Hello. Is that working? Yep, all right, good afternoon, everyone. Welcome back, thank you for staying. So this is the part in the... My name is Toby Gardner, I'm a senior research fellow at the Stockholm Environment Institute. It's a great privilege to be here and help try and facilitate this final discussion, which is where we can really move the conversation from reacting and trying to understand and process the fantastic presentation that Camille gave to think about what it means for society and what it means for different elements of society that are trying to take action. And my hope is that now we can drop some of the formalities and feel comfortable to disagree with each other. I think one of the take-homes that Camille gave us that's been mentioned already by every speaker, was certainly the one that stuck in my mind, is that we need to have more conversations in pubs. And as a Brit stranded in Sweden for the last five years, Sweden is a wonderful country, but you do need more pubs. I couldn't agree with you more. So, you know, feel not that it is very public, but feel more like you're in a place because we need urgently, we need desperately fertile, safe environments to disagree with each other. There's enough platitudes, there's enough recognition of the big picture issues that we can all agree on. Let's get down to some actual specifics. What works? What doesn't work? How does that perspective of success differ between different elements of society? And if things aren't working how we want them to work, what needs to be done practically in order to make them work? The kind of question that Louise posed, she comes from a business background, what is the one recommendation that you can give me to try and improve the conservation benefits of agriculture? It's a very hard thing to answer, but that is the kind of on-the-spot advice that many sectors need. So without further ado, let's get stuck in. Camille was a bit worried that she was expected to be the oracle to answer all of your huge questions about the end of human society and anything else. She remains an oracle, but she's joined by three more oracles. So if you could join me on this stage, we've got Louise who comes from a background of having advised many companies, most recently Coop on sustainable strategies, please join. Camille herself, the chief oracle. Mark, who works for the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency, whom I've had the pleasure of working together with in the context of the Intergovernmental Platform Bidiversity System Services, and Tuja who comes from the Swedish Bidiversity Centre in here in Uppsala. So welcome. So this is very much a conversation, this is not pose your questions and they give answers. Let's mix it up, think of the comments and questions that you have yourselves and don't be shy about it either, make provocations. So to kick us off, the general theme of Camille's talk was one of unprecedented change, very rapid change, exemplified most obviously by climate change, coming in over the top of so many local and national factors and really putting a question mark over the adequacy of anything that we're doing on the ground. And another facet was the pace of this change. So the first question or provocation that I'd like to put to our panel and for all of us to start thinking about is to what extent are the actions that we're taking now destined to already become obsolete or redundant or too little too late given the rapid pace of change? Camille gave the nice example of taking two years to reach a consensus between just her and one economist. In two years, that's half an election cycle in most democracies. That's an unacceptably slow, no disrespect because I spend the same length of time trying to reach a consensus with my friends, much less colleagues. That's an unacceptable pace of change in order to serve up answers. The pace of research generally is too slow to go from idea, conception, execution, design and publication is often two years. That's too slow. So maybe Louise, maybe we could kick off with you because often I find in these kinds of discussions sometimes the most unashamed and more pragmatic observations come from the business sector because they're having to make decisions probably quicker than anybody else in reaction to consumer preferences or changes in price signals. What in your experience, Louise, having maybe your experience examples and maybe what you've seen of others do you think is really an optimistic change that's happening at the moment that is in place with what's happening and what do you think are the areas or the specific kind of efforts that you think we should just let go of maybe because they're gonna be delivering too little, too late and they're perhaps a distraction. Are there many things that we're doing that are too local maybe, that are too marginalized, that are perhaps important for a particular context but they're not gonna be scaled? So some realism maybe combined with some hope. Now you posed many questions at the same time, Toby. That's not what you're supposed to do. But I would like to say that I think that one thing that has really united people in the corporate world and research and government is the sustainable development goals for 2030. It's just 12 years away but if you live in a corporate life which I have done for a long time, 12 years is a very, very long time. Now you look at me and you think about the ferns, right? I think 400 million years. But 12 years is a very long time. A quarter, a quarterly report is a long time but I think this has created a framework with 17 goals where more or less four or five goals can be directly related to climate and biodiversity. And then I think about goal number sustainable cities, number 11, responsible consumption and production, number 12, life on land and water, climate, et cetera. So you have a few there. You have a framework and you have goals. So you have goals and you have sub-goals and we are actually now sitting in the United Nation agreeing upon how we're supposed to measure. So companies like IKEA or the cooperative or a junior level, we don't have to think about what kind of goals should we have? What should we focus on? It's decided there is a framework and we're going to measure in the same way that's unprecedented. In combination with the second thing, I think we have a big global movement that was first driven by youth but also by young people at least in the food industry that people are starting to eat less meat. So that happened in a very, very short time. I've been with the cooperative for six years and the last two years, it's tremendous. We have categories within vegetarian food that is growing with 211% per year. I mean, it's unprecedented. You don't see those three numbers of growth in one category. So that's having a big effect of course on climate and what you eat. And if you think about it, like I come from a company used to have five million customers a week and I'm a kind of person who eat a lot. So maybe I eat three or four or five times per day and I chew a lot. So you can actually make a difference in your selection of food and dinner every day. And here I think you asked on an individual level, here I think that companies and retailers need to take a bigger responsibility to give people an alternative. So those are the two big changes which I'm really seeing and this boils down to money. Companies like the one I've been representing, we see that we can make profit, we can drive sales by offering an alternative product. But then corporate need, they need to know what to do. So when they ask this super single question or what are we gonna do by diversity? You know, at least we need to have platforms where we can discuss and talk about finding those measures and try it out because we don't have time to wait. Excellent, so let me narrow down a bit, Louise. You were right to say that this is a lot of issues at once. So the goals are exciting, it provide a framework. We've got more spaces to exchange ideas but where do you think, particularly on biodiversity? So the question of how to grapple with complexity, I mean, biodiversity itself is an inherently much more complex challenge than climate change. On biodiversity in particular, where do you think that the private sector in Sweden or in your own sector is managing to keep a pace with the changes that we're seeing? Is it mobilizing itself quickly enough? What are the concrete things that you would say that are being done now that wouldn't have been thought of 10 years ago? What's surprising you that how the private sector is responding? Are there any pleasant surprises? Yeah, so I'm just gonna take one example that comes from my own sector. So four years ago, we started to sit down with our competitors and in Sweden, that is Ike and Axelund Kupen who said, what can we do about this? Together with the ones providing the food. So somebody from the vegetable industry, somebody from fish, somebody from dairy, somebody from meat and say, what can we agree upon? Let's find the common denominators. What do we think about climate? What do we think about biodiversity? What do we think about chemicals, et cetera? So we have agreed in this group after four years, what we think is a little bit better from a climate perspective, a little bit better from a biodiversity perspective and arranged this into two parts. One is products and systems that we want to grow and the other ones that we want to raise. So raise the bottom, the worst thing, take them away or raise them and grow the top. And here we are working together then with WWF who is our science partner and provoking us a lot. We're listening to one of our biggest critics and in addition, we are also working with the third party label certifications like for example, organic, raw of rainforest alliance, et cetera and we're testing them. So we're telling them, we're gonna promote your certifications on the shelf when the customer comes in. If you all the time push it according to our sort of say direction. So I think 10 years ago, we would not have sat down with our competitors. We would not have agreed after four years. We would not have sat down with the growers and the farmers in that way. And we would not been able without WWF and science partners from rice to be able to define, okay, what should we focus in with climate, biodiversity, chemicals, et cetera, within each category, meat, fish, et cetera. So we have a way and we have, how do you say, a roadmap for 2030 in this group. And this is unprecedented in Sweden. And it's also based on the Swedish culture of cooperation. So I will be happy to share it with you later. It's for free. It's out there, use it and make it global because it makes a difference. Thank you. Okay, maybe just to get a sense of how people might react or contribute to this discussion, to have an idea of who we have in the room. If you consider yourself to be a natural scientist, if you could raise your hands. And if you consider yourself to be a social scientist, and if you consider yourself to not be a scientist at all, excellent. Okay, the last answer was reassuring, but the first two was symptomatic of too many of these discussions is that a lot of this debate is grounded in the empirical observations from natural scientists. So let's pivot now maybe from the private sector to government, Mark. So obviously you're not to be responsible for everything that happens in this Swedish government. Thank you. What do you feel proud about that Sweden is doing in order to keep pace with this rapid environmental change that we're facing? The same question to Louise. What is happening now, and not just in terms of goals, but actual concrete actions, what's happening now that would have been unthinkable, or very difficult to conceive of 10 years ago? Well, these are good questions, especially right now, when we don't know what will happen tomorrow or the day after tomorrow, working for the government. But I think as Sweden, as Swedish people, we can be proud of actually the way Sweden and the EU act internationally for bringing the process forward and giving inspiration. And the example that you took was a very good example, and there's lots of those kinds of examples that give inspiration to other countries as well. So I think, well, you said I shouldn't talk about goals, but a lot of international cooperation is about setting the goals and the sustainable development targets and so on. Those are important, although they're just targets. They actually serve to gather the world and countries and strive to reach them. So I think you can't say they're just targets and what else is happening, it's all together. And I think as a Swedish delegation, I always feel very happy to be in the camp of the good guys, so to say, and then we need to take that home and make it work as well. And that's where the hard part starts, really. But I think the past few years, there's been quite a lot of good work going on in Sweden as well. We have had, and again, this is hard to talk about right now at this moment in time, but we have had new thoughts about how we can manage biodiversity. We're talking about plans for green infrastructure, which means that we create connectivity in the landscape so that we don't see the landscape just the way it is, but there should be. We should be forward-thinking and making movement in the landscape possible, also because of climate change. So that's really something that has started after the past couple of years. We are restoring and recreating wetlands, which is good both against climate change and for biodiversity, but also against the nutrient loss and so on. So there's a lot of things going on that I think we can be happy about. I also think when it comes to the decision-makers' reality, there's no lack of information. There's a lot of information and there's heaps of papers that you have to read. So I think as scientists, we really need to make sure that the information that we have comes out to the decision-makers and to the politicians and saying that we are not quite sure yet and it's very complicated and more research is needed. That doesn't really work because then decision-makers will read something else instead. There's always information, I think. So it's better to make a decision on the best information available than on the second best information available. So that's just a thought I had when you started off with the many questions to Louise. Yep. Thank you, Mark. And Tuya, maybe moving to you, if it is the case, you're running a biodiversity research center. If it is the case that we have enough information to be making many decisions or at least informing many decisions a lot better, what is the role of research and the research process in society and particularly in this common theme of how we can keep up with this pace of change and not always be on the back foot, what can the research community or the contract, if you like, between research and society do to try and close this gap between delivering information and being able to take action on it? Does the role of research and the scientific community need to shift in response to this pace of change? And if so, how and what concrete actions are you taking to try and step up to that? Well, that was many questions too. I'll start with this. I think we need to stop to talk about environmental problems and talk about, for example, extinction of species and climate change as societal problems. I think we have a vocabulary today that distances us from nature, from the problems we see coming from our actions, our thoughts, our actions, our production, consumption, lifestyle, et cetera. And we need to remedy that, I think, with new concepts that put us, that creates a deeper understanding of who we are as a species. We are nature. We need to recognize that from school, in business, in research, but somehow this feels too emotional for many people, especially researchers. We're supposed to be objective and just think about objective things, but there is actually a theory about humans called the Biofilia Hypothesis that says that we are dependent on a material level and a life-supporting level with nature, but we also have a genetic predisposition for spiritual needs, for meaningful lives, et cetera. This is a hypothesis, of course, and it is a research area, but I think we need to be more emotional in research. And there is actually a line of research in social science going into the lack of recognition of us as social beings, as emotional beings, et cetera. Somehow in this neoliberal and number area that we live in has created a society that is poor of concepts that embraces what we are as a whole, as humans. I don't know where I started, but I ended up there. Sorry, that was very emotional, but yeah. Mark, some emotion, please. Thank you. Personally, I couldn't agree more with what you say, but I'm also here as the bureaucrat. So I think there's room for several kinds of concepts and when we have to talk to the politicians, I'm sure that there are some politicians or other decision makers that would appreciate such an approach, those that really have the money, I'm not quite sure about. What they ask for, and you were also telling earlier that you had to learn economic speech, they want some very clear figures. And when we started talking about ecosystem services, we thought that we could put figures on biodiversity that went so-so, it's great as a concept, but it's very hard to put hard figures on it and personally, well, biodiversity is more than just what it does for us. But those, we need to have different, to have the possibility to have different concepts in our head when talking to different people, I think. And those who have the money are the economists at the Ministry of Finance, they don't like emotions. Let's throw the conversation out to the rest of the room. Can I just have one comment on that? Please, yeah. I've been doing research on bureaucrats. That's one of my special interests. She's currently studying UMARC. Yes, just so you know. And we interviewed an economist in one of the municipalities in Sweden and just to highlight what they need, what he said was when we talked about sustainability, environmental integration, et cetera, he said very seriously, environment is so far from reality. So I mean, that's where we are. So I agree with you. We need to talk with different people with different concepts. And it seems actually from research, I've also been doing that, the ecosystem service concept, though it is criticized for being too anthropocentric, actually can bridge to the economists. So, yeah. I actually want to make a comment on that. When I was working with this economist, one of the first things he said, well, good Lord, what's the value of a Van Gogh sunflower painting? We value it all the time. Why on earth do you think you can't place a value on beauty? And it might be the beauty of a butterfly in a meadow. And he was like, of course you can place a value on it. This is nonsense. So he felt like ecologists were trying to do these hard numbers, sort of water purification, air purification. And he said that, you know, you've got to broaden it. If you can value a Van Gogh, you can value a butterfly. So... Do people agree with that? Put your hand up if you feel that it's just as easy to value a butterfly as to value a Van Gogh painting. And if you disagree, be brave. Still thinking. Most of you are still thinking about this. I mean, the Achilles heel, of course, that many points to in the ecosystem services approach is that it lends itself to valuing the things that can more easily be valued. Some things are inherently more easy to value. Processing clean water. It's done through other ways, so you can say how much does that cost? If it can be done by nature, that's what its value is. There isn't an alternative approach to having an endangered butterfly, so you have to use a different approach. But let's now, so here's an opportunity. We've got representatives from business, from government, from the research community. And we're talking about reality checks and what works and what doesn't work and what's considered naive. What are the perspectives from the rest of the room as to the pace of change? Are there suggestions? Can you make concrete questions that you've had? Concrete ideas. As to why doesn't business respond in this way? Why isn't the government doing X? And the chance to pose those questions and hear some of the hard truths as to why they've not yet been possible. Why it's taken four years of extremely hard work, I'm sure, by a grouping of market-leading companies to come up with a collective consensus about what things they should start excluding and what things they should start investing in. But it's still four years. We only have a margin of decades to try and change a lot. So what comments or suggestions do any of you have on what you think business and government and the research community as well should be doing to respond to this radically fast pace of change. And then let's hear as to why that is not yet happening. Yes, please. This economic model of growth doesn't really seem to fit with a picture of Earth's finite resources. And how can we continue with this type of model? Is it a sustainable model? So this is the question that all these discussions end up with, right? And Louise is supposed to have the answer. Let's take a couple more. Yeah, in the middle, please. So Camille before said about the goal of one and a half degrees and that two degrees would be really dangerous. And my question is, even if we stop all the gas emissions, the forestation and all that, because I guess there is a time lag until these things accumulate and all that, will it reach this level? It's impossible to avoid reaching this level. And in face of this, should we be putting our efforts into mitigating reaching this level or dealing with it from now on? So you're asking is it, should we start giving up on mitigating and shifting our limited resources to adapting? Okay. Let's take one more. These are the small questions. Small questions, yeah. Continuing on the pace of change. I'm interested in your insights into how you can handle things that have a different rate of change. So I think it's specifically about corporations having, you're working on very small time scales in the way you can adapt to change in demand or changing policy, but how that translates down to the people doing the actual agriculture and the difficulty of changing your practices to new demands or policies. Okay. Let's maybe, Luigi must get this question a lot as to, is there a simple, is it simply irreconcilable, the current capitalist model? However you wish to define that because we could all have a different definition of that. With what's needed to be done to safeguard biodiversity. Do you see shifts in how the capitalist model is being defined? And do you see potential shifts where there is the potential, for example, to move away from an assumption that we need to increase the number of customers that you have to a shift maybe more towards quality or higher prices. Is it a truism that path ripped into the DNA of the business model of a major retailer has to be increasing the customer base to increase the amount and the volume of things that we consume? Or are there actually other elements to the business model that are seriously considered that can compete with just increasing the amount that's being consumed? I would like to first say that I'm not kind of, even though I'm an international economist, I'm not into the, in favor of the current definition of growth that we have. And I think even if I would have stood here at talking for the cooperative, I think that the kind of consumerism that we're driving right now, it's not feasible. It is not compatible with our definition of growth. But I'm also optimistic because I think it's like, if we need them to consume less, some companies are gonna go out of business and that's nothing strange with that. But I would like to turn the question around a little bit because we're all part of this wheel and what we consume. And I'm very optimistic about the future also when it comes to artificial intelligence, technique and data. Why are we consumers not using our data to push for the kind of system that we want, to push for the kind of services and products that we want? Because if you think about it, if you have a membership card today and you're shopping, a retailer like myself, we have all data about you. We know what you eat. We know when you eat. We know when you shop. We know when you're on Facebook. Everybody has this information now. But there are very few people who ask to get their data back and to say, well, you know, I would like you to use my data, but this is what I wanna shop. This is what I wanna have to drive growth, to drive your sales and to drive my benefit. So there is extreme potential here in a new kind of growth. And maybe some of you are familiar with the concept of triple bottom line that you can combine economics, ecological and social benefit. At Stockholm, Brazilians, they often call it the Mickey Mouse economy because they are not three kind of similar spheres, but economy is really big and then social and ecology. So we have failed during the last two decades since triple bottom line concept was introduced to actually to create the balance. And I also think that the consumers have to start to react and especially in Sweden, it's not that you just pay 50% tax every month and give away your money as somebody else is gonna solve your problem. So I believe in economic growth, but I think consumerism have to go down. We have to start to work with data. We have to listen to consumers and maybe create other products and consume less. And before we talked about meat and we talked about economics, for example. And here of course, we see that people normally, they wanna have the cake and eat it, but if they get their data back, they will see, okay, if you're gonna be able to manage one and a half degree, two degrees, that you're questioning in the middle there, well, maybe then I'm sorry, but you have to be vegan. I'm sorry, but that's probably the reality. And are we prepared to do that? No, we're not. So we have to find a different way. And that's then the third question was, you know, this is about time and change. I think the benefit with corporates, if you make them listen, you make them understand. And I think it's both numbers and feelings, especially the philanthropists that have a lot of money, both international in Sweden, you can make them understand concepts and they will do it so much faster. There are some philanthropists in the world today, they made such a big change that governments or companies could not have done in such a short time. So that's also what I put my hope to, you know, that people will a lot of money, understand that, okay, we can do this in three quarters, not, you know, 400 million years, the life of a fern. I have to go faster than that. So I'm positive. I answered all three questions. No, thank you. But I'm really engaged in this. And I'm telling you all, use your data, start to be demanding about what change you want to see. Thank you, provocation back to us. But Louise, maybe more specifically, on this consumerism model, it's about eating cake and about trying to produce food more efficiently. It's often caricatured as a need to produce more food more efficiently to feed the world, as if it's some imperative that we need more food just to keep people alive. But of course, often the improvements in agricultural efficiency are about reducing price and reducing costs in order to sell to more people. It's nothing at all to do with satisfying hunger. So a specific question, do you think it's simply the case that food has now become too cheap in Europe, for example? And is there a role, is there a decision-making role of the retail sector to address that? Or does it need the government to come in and impose great attacks? I mean, it is the case that the proportion of our household expenditure on food is a fraction now of what it was 50 years ago. And is this something that's just impossible to get around? I don't think it's impossible, but now you're asking me to deliver a simple answer on something that none of the researchers could do here. So I think that's a little bit unfair, as you all are smarter than me. But what I would like to say is that, yes, food is cheap, but not for everyone. And today, maybe we produce food for 14 billion people, and they are not on this planet today. So I don't believe in producing more food will help more people out of zero hunger, which is one of the global goals. So I don't believe in that. But for sure, there are things where policy have to go in much, much stricter, I think. And also, I think that we need to use taxes to make that happen. Otherwise, you need to spank business into that because some food is really too cheap and others is not. And normally, the food that is good for the planet is more expensive. But I would also like to say the 14 million in Sweden alone, 50% of the population is overweight or obese. So it's not that they are eating too little. So there you also have an issue. They should eat less than more can feed on the food that they would have eaten. Thank you. That was a little unfair, but that was an excellent answer. I don't know if we're using Chattenhouse rules here, but if anyone's just tweeted that Louise recommends that the government spanks business into action by taxing them, then the horse has bolted. It's okay. So I counted on that. It's okay. Spank away. Camille, the question about mitigation and adaptation, do you see it as taking into account the many conversations that you have with decision makers around the impacts of climate change? Do you see it, and there is a limited resource budget, of course, do you see it as something of an either or, increasingly an either or? Or how do you see the best way to try and reconcile the need to continue to mitigate, whilst also adapting given limited resources to do both? Well, if we treat it as an either or, we've lost. I mean, we have got to do both. And at this point, and we actually, I was co-author on a paper that did the numbers, we actually can still keep under two degrees. 1.5, not so clear. But two degrees we can keep under, but what we have to do to do that is to take very rapid action. We need to increase the carbon sinks around the world. And that's one of the points I was trying to make with restoring native habitat, restoring prairie grasses, restoring seagrasses, restoring habitats that will capture more atmospheric carbon. We have to do that at the same time as reducing emissions. Now, 20 years ago, it was either or. Now it's we have to do both of those. And we're going to have to go much heavier into nuclear power. Again, 10 years ago, that wasn't something that was essential. But for keeping under two degrees now, because emissions have kept continuing to go up, we actually would have to go full nuclear as much as we could. We'll run out of uranium pretty soon anyway. So it's not something that's gonna take over the world. Sorry, Kevin. And then work on something like fusion power, but that's 100, 200 years down the road. And the nuclear fission has to be the bridge between the current electrical generation and the future, which hopefully would be fusion. And unfortunately, if 10 years ago we'd taken the actions that were recommended then, we wouldn't have to do that. So the more we delay as emissions keep going up, the harder the mitigation will become. And I don't know how long we've got before even that set of solutions will become inadequate. So yeah, we can still just about do it, but it's doing things a lot of people don't wanna do. So there's a couple of really interesting kind of hard truths or pragmatic perspectives there, but there's also some what some might consider to be dangerous optimism that is this assumption that negative emissions technologies or sinks will in the future are necessary in order for us to get as beneath a two degree target. Now some critiques of that position would say that allowing us to have the luxury of that assumption that sinks need to be a big part of the solution detracts from the immediacy of needing to reduce actual emissions now, rather than the sequestering today's emissions tomorrow. What would you say to that? Well, I mean, no, we can't wait. That's why I'm plugging habitat restoration, not technological carbon sinks. So there are technologies that literally can suck up carbon out of the atmosphere, but I've talked to the engineers working on these types of solutions. They're not large scale. But even habitat restoration is still a future technology and inverted. No, it's not. We need labor. We need high school kids. Quite honestly, we know how to restore habitat. We can restore tropical rainforest. We can restore Native American prairie. We can restore coastal wetlands. We know how to do this. People are doing it all the time. It's very expensive. Why? Because it takes a lot of labor. So I'm like, get all those kids out there and do it doing it as part of their education. And we could do massive habitat restoration if that really was something we were willing to act on. Great. Excellent. There's a good series of recommendations coming out of this spank business. Mobilize high school kids to plant trees. And go to the pub. I want to come back to the room. But maybe just taking, so the other provocation that you made is that nuclear power is the least worst option, if you like. It's a necessary evil. Maybe just let's take a quick poll of the room. Who believes, and maybe you don't think it's an evil at all, but who believes that it's necessary, whether you recognize it as being a necessary evil or just fine? Who thinks that it's a necessary part of the solution to provide the bridge that Camille is speaking to? Raise your hand. And who disagrees that it's necessary? OK, great. Well, maybe on that then, who would like to offer their perspective as to why they feel it's unnecessary and what should be done instead and why isn't it being done? And then maybe Mark could give us a perspective, because Sweden has a very ambitious target to become carbon neutral by 20. Well, I mean, depending on which government now comes in, but there is an ambitious target for Sweden to become carbon neutral. Of course, that can be delivered through a number of different pathways. But maybe one or two of those who don't accept that nuclear is an essential bridge could say what they do think is the right path. And then let's hear some comments as to why that can't be the solution. Anyone who's confident enough to stand by there, thank you. Well, I wish I could agree, but it seems that the production and the growth of nuclear power is so slow, so we don't have time to wait for it. OK, we're diverting from biodiversity here, but these are the elephants in the room. It's good to get them out of the room. Anyone else want to comment on that in particular? Over here, please. And then to you. I'm not completed against nuclear power, but I don't necessarily think we should build a lot more, because of what he said, and because it's super expensive and compared to many other options we have. And then I'm afraid that without going into degrowth, cheap energy will just increase the energy use and not increase the energy use from coal or oil or so on. So notion therefore that energy is also maybe now too cheap for many people in the same way that food is arguably too cheap for many people. To you, you wanted to jump in. Well, just a short comment not to get stuck in. The nuclear energy business. I'm an expert on the government's final disposal of nuclear waste committee. And there are huge problems in what to do with the spent nuclear fuel. And we have spent nuclear fuel dispersed in different places all over the world, in some places in a very good, safe way, in other places in terrible, there's a disaster leaking, et cetera, et cetera. And the solution being developed now in Sweden and in Finland, it's the only solution being developed at the moment. The KBS3 method still is in a process of being developed. We don't even know if the science around the copper canister, if that's OK, and if it can last for 100,000 years, which is the recommendation. So just for that reason, I think it's very difficult at the moment to continue with the nuclear energy. Though it might be useful as energy for new nuclear power plants in the future, but we're not there yet. But maybe we shouldn't continue that discussion. No, no, but it's good to have somebody who actually is informed about these issues. Mark, you wanted to come in on that? Did I? I think you wanted me to come in. I think this is becoming a very political debate when we start talking about nuclear power. And as Tuja said, we really need to have a long-term perspective. Politicians usually think four-year cycles. And this is 100,000 years. It's 10 times the time we have had agriculture. So it's a huge amount of time. We cannot really start thinking about it. That really stretches my mind, at least. But I think by the end of the day, this is a very political discussion. And there is more than just figures and facts in this. Here we have the emotions. The emotions, yeah, overwhelm. All right, we've reflected a bit on the past and how to keep up with rapid change. And I think it's irrefutable that we are in a place where there are conversations at least and targets being set and levels of consensus being achieved that, compared to 20 years ago, are unprecedented in their ambition. But let's now fast forward 10 years, which is a reasonable leap forwards, and ask concretely maybe of the panel to start. And then all of us in the room, what would be, to start with, just one measure of success, one key performance indicator, if you like, that if it was satisfied from the perspective of the responsibilities that you have, whether it's the panel here in research, in government, in business, or whatever perspective you're coming from in the room, what would you consider to be a laudable measure of success that you think you, your sector, or we as a society, that should be happy to have achieved? Maybe, too, kick us off. Yes, in 10 years, I go to my favorite store and I'm going to buy a shirt. You can all close your eyes at this point if you want, if you're imagining that. And on the clothes I buy, there is a label on how it promotes biodiversity. Because I mean, we, for example, grow cotton. And I can't buy a t-shirt today that tells me if it's grown in a way that supports biodiversity, pollination, et cetera. It says, echo something, and I don't know what it's all about. So this example shows me that in 10 years, research has provided us with more knowledge and information on the indirect and direct effects of lifestyle consumption and production on biodiversity. Because we don't have that today. We don't have enough information on human and societal drivers. And I mean, also indirect drivers of why biodiversity is being impacted, why ecosystems, et cetera. We have the superficial ones, oh, it's the growth, oh, it's people are eating too much, et cetera, et cetera. We need solid humanities and social science on this issue. A lot of natural scientists, I'm sorry to say, try to do social science research today. That is finding societal solutions. But we need for the humanities and social sciences to step up. And we need the natural scientists to open up for humanities and social scientists to define the problems. They are the experts on societies and humans. And that's what I'm hoping for the coming 10 years. Excellent, thank you too. To biodiversity-friendly shirts, but on your running a research center, fast forward 10 years, what would be an indicator of success in that shift that you're demanding of a much deeper integration of social science? What specific ways would research be being done differently? Maybe how it's funded or how it's rewarded? What's missing now? Yeah, well, what's missing is a huge government spending on that, of course. But otherwise, I think we're in a good spot actually because we have researchers from philosophy, law, we have sociology, et cetera, et cetera, and natural scientists working together. It is a struggle, as you say, and we have to learn every day that our concepts and learn the world views we have, is it socially constructed or not, for example. Do you think the research process is on the right track? I think so, but I don't think that funding organizations are on the spot yet. They're very much supporting disciplinary research. They have difficulties in understanding the contributions from interdisciplinary research. And I also think that supporting transdisciplinary research, and with that, I mean interdisciplinarity combined with the input from society outside academia. That is a matter of scientific quality to bring in the society because we as researchers don't know enough about the lives of bureaucrats and the citizens to design really good research. We need to bring them in, their perspectives. Thank you, excellent. Other members of the panel, fast forwarding 10 years, the same exercise, let's take it to the room as well. What specific measures of success that you feel we should be proud about if you have any? Mark. Okay, to start with, I'd be happy to join you too, yeah, as a bureaucrat. I think, well, last year we celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Swedish EPA. And of course, an obvious reason for celebration would be that the EPA is no longer needed in 10 years time. But then again, it could be that there is no EPA for other reasons in 10 years time, so that in itself wouldn't be a good indicator. I think I'm going to come with the boring answer again. I think 10 years ago, we were discussing the target, the 2010 target for biodiversity, which was halting a lot of biodiversity by 2010. So then we met in Nagoya in Japan and decided on the target for 2020. And now the meeting in Beijing was already mentioned earlier today. So now we're starting preparing what's happening beyond 2020. So probably we'll end up with another target that we will be discussing in 10 years time what will happen after the 2030 target, which is part of the sustainable development goals as well. But I hope that the discussion will be a different discussion at that time than it has been now and 10 years ago. And it may be so because it is part of this sustainable development goals framework this time. And if we look back at the millennium development goals, they actually made sense and some of the targets were reached. So once we get the whole world to cooperate on these targets, I think there's a slightly higher, higher chance of success this time so that in whatever the target will be that we decide in two years time, maybe we can in 10 years time, see that we are actually on the way of at least reaching several of the sub targets. And I know that's a very bureaucratic answer, but that's my answer right now. Thank you. No, Mark, it's a good answer because those targets haven't yet been defined, right? And they will define investment and biodiversity policy in many countries. And just to make it clear, I'm not suggesting that we put a target so low that we have to reach them. Okay. We really have to be ambitious and make sure that we reach the ambitious targets. You preempted my question. Thanks. So biodiversity-friendly shirts and successful delivery on the CBDs 20 targets at the two KPIs so far. Camille, Louise, do you want to... Yeah, so I mean there's one specific metric which I would really like to see in 10 years time, which is a flattening of greenhouse gas emissions, right? Instead of always going up, always being worse than we thought it would be 10 years ago, just flat, not even declining. That's too much, but flat. And the way I would like to see that that was achieved is by the next generation, meaning the people in school now, the kids now, growing up and living their lives the way we're all talking about, where they're thinking in their lifestyle, in their choices of food, in their choices of where to shop, what to shop for, thinking about sustainability, about climate change impacts, embedded in how they think they're about living their day and their week, rather than being something external, to actually be something they've taken in, brought home to their life, and they do automatically without having to really think about it. So that's what I would like to see in 10 years. Thank you. And Louise, whether it's from the perspective of the food retail sector or business more generally, what do you think would be deserving of a pat on the back for the role of private sector in 10 years' time having achieved? Somebody mentioned the issue of the concept of scenarios. I think within, we say, 10 years or 20, 30, I would have hoped the time before that, scenarios would have been delivered by clever scientists, because I'm also thinking about we need more money for research, et cetera. I'm in the position where I've been many years and thinking, we know so much. We already know, but we don't do it. That's the most troublesome thing for me. I mean, you don't have to become smarter. Just we do, now, what you say, or send out the high school kids or whatever, and that's really frustrating. We have the science we know. We need to understand, maybe see scenarios to understand the implications. And then I think what I would have liked to see is to see that we measure, that we have the data, and we can start in the 17 goals, and there are 156 indicators, and we deliver on them on nation level, and on corporate level, and on personal level. So for example, if you work with biodiversity, look at the 17 goals. Where can I put in biodiversity? If you're a consumer, where can I add from a consumer perspective? We need to work with the numbers, just like you do, looking back, forwards, but we need to work with the data, and I would really like that we use data in a positive way, in the focus on sustainability, because it's not happening today. I don't see any usage of data or technique right now that is enhancing the drive for a more sustainable livelihood, planet, et cetera. If I'm gonna be very, very tough, of course there are startups, there are ideas, but if you really look at the data, it's not happening. The data is used to sell more, to earn more, and get bigger profits for a few individuals. I mean that's quite a concrete and kind of invigorating provocation. You genuinely don't see any application, because this is a role of the research community as well, embedded in more in business. You don't see any genuine use of data to drive positive, encourage positive choices yet in the market. Not fast enough. Not fast enough. Not fast enough. I think my boss would fire me if I didn't interrupt on this one. There is a current government assignment to five or six national authorities exactly on this data, use of data and how data can be used to, well as they put it, to drive the economy, but also to reach other targets. So we at the Swedish EPA have an assignment that is called smarter environmental information, which actually is trying to see how we can use all the information that's out in society to make people everywhere, including citizens, scientists, policy makers, make smarter choices for the environment. So this is exactly in line with what you're describing, I think, so maybe we should have a chat afterwards. Absolutely, and I think that's great, but what I also talk about, the data is used, I'm also from a corporate perspective, meaning in terms of earning money. So I mean the corporates need to come in here and to sell things then and to use the data that we have. So if I'm just a simple thing that I talk about all the time, people who listened to me before, they've heard this, it's like how many times on the Sunday when you're preparing for the week with your family and your kids, do you get data and say, hi Louise, we see that you're a high income earner. What kind of things would you like to have on your shopping list? We have offers on ecological food, sustainable food, and by the way, we see that you have two small kids, maybe you need to buy wellies because it's gonna rain next week. No, they're sending me information about ships and Coca-Cola, and I've been part of this industry. So this is what I mean, that I'm really concrete about. Great. The science is there, the data is there, but it needs to be used in a more creative way much faster because we don't have time, maybe we don't have 10 years. So that's what I wanna see. Thank you. So let's get some more perspectives of success from the rest of the room, but just to get another poll, there's an assumption in some of these comments that information itself packaged intelligently, used intelligently, is itself a major barrier to change, quite a few of us who work in this space believe that. Is that a qualifier to that provocation? Yes, it does, because it was the question from the earlier panel, how to communicate broadly, and I think there is a lot of intelligence in the room, but the thing is when you communicate with sometimes bureaucrats, politicians, and normal consumers, you need to simplify the message so much without it becoming simplistic, and that's really the issue that is so, so difficult, but if you do that and you do that cleverly, if you call it intelligently, then you can drive the masses, and that's what we need to do without losing evidence-based scientific perspective. Okay, so a sweet spot of simplification, to you? I'm not sure it's about simplification, because what we've seen when we've looked at how the ecosystem service concept is used, it's more about making it meaningful for different contexts. So in one company where they used the ecosystem service concept, they had to redo it, because starting both with echo and system was too strange for the people working on the floor. It didn't link to what they were doing, so they had to reformulate it to fit the activity. So it's not always about simplifying. But just stepping back, the question I want to put is, to what extent is it about information at all? So you would like to see biodiversity-friendly shirts, presumably there would still be other shirts on the hanger, but you're an informed customer, so you'd know which one you wanted to buy. And Louise is talking about the delivery or packaging, if you like, of data and information in an intelligent way that hits you at the right time and enables you to make the choice that you otherwise wouldn't have known you preferred to make. But it's still about information, it's still about access to information. Just take a poll of the room. Who agrees that, however it's packaged, how we manage and how we package and how we serve up information is a really critical part of changing decisions, whether it's on an individual level or whether it's at a policy level. Who really sees information in whatever form as a major barrier? You've got half of the room, who doesn't? So about a third of the room, maybe. Tuit, do you want to come back in on that? Because that lies at the heart, I think, perhaps a lot of the work that you're doing in trying to nudge policies and understand how to change the mindset and support decision makers. Well, if you go to theories of learning, that is how people change. And I'm not talking about learning in educational settings, but in our everyday life. You know that there's three dimensions to changing the capacity to do something. And one thing is what you need to learn, and that's about information. This is what you should do to support biodiversity. The other thing is motivation that is linked to feelings, identity, all other stuff that we usually exclude but that actually the companies working with the marketing, et cetera, know a lot about. So those two dimensions are at work when we learn something, but in order for something to become a permanent capacity change, you also need to, the environment, whatever it is, your workplace or your family to support and enhance the things you're supposed to learn, the motivation. And if you want learning and change to happen, all these three dimensions have to be at work at the same time. So information is not enough. It's also about the motivation and what motivates. Sometimes it is information, but mostly not, especially if it's an information about the catastrophe that the earth is going to come into. And because then you say, oh no, no, no, it's not going to happen. And you think about other stuff. So it's a tricky business how to motivate politicians, bureaucrats, companies and the general public. It's very complex. Thank you, Louise, was this on the same point? Yeah, I just want to say one simple example. It may sound simple than in your world, but for example, we had an issue. We wanted to go from talking about ecological products, organic products, to climate, to talk about biodiversity. And we were thinking then in the company I worked for that used to be COOP, that some of you know, how are we going to talk about this? And one thing was of course to talk about the pollination services and bees. So we made a big campaign about this. And we talked to scientists, we wrote a report and we asked them, is this something you can agree upon? Or, and some of them were hesitant because they don't want to be too unserious to be part of a kind of retail campaign. But then you can say, okay, is this 90%, 95% okay or true? Yeah, that's okay. So we did the report and we launched this together with Dave Goulson that maybe some of you know who are big into bees. And then we said to our consumers, because you have credit points when you shop with a retailer, you can donate your points if you want to support the bees and beehive and the pollination services. And I remember when I came back from a trip to Almedalen and my boss, he was going around in the corridor, screaming, it's like, stop those bees because they were kind of breaking down the whole point system because people were wanting to trade in their points for the bees. So it was a total chaos because people loved the campaign, they loved the idea, they loved the knowledge that they got about pollination and understood that it's not only bees pollinating, but of course also other insects, et cetera. But we simplified something, but we made a point with a very simplistic campaign without, I think, destroying the idea, the natural scientific perspective. But that's how simple we have to be to make the consumers interested and raise awareness about because then they asked, okay, what should we purchase? What should we buy? What kind of products should we promote? Okay, is organic products better from biodiversity from a scientific perspective here in Sweden at least? We said, yes, it is. So choose this product instead of this product. And I would also like to say there is biodiversity enhancing food products on the shelf today, also t-shirts. It's just that one who are selling those t-shirts, they don't dare to communicate that perspective and they think that the consumers don't want it. So the products are there. So start asking for them. And I know with a big Swedish retailer who's kind of in every shopping street, they do it today. So ask them to label it up. Very good, thank you. Right, let's go back to, we're gonna run out of time, but I think we are gonna have a moment for final reflections, but I think these are much more interesting final reflections that we're getting in the room. Does anyone else wanna contribute a concrete vision that they have for a particular indicator of success that they think we should have reached and we will be content and satisfied if we have reached in 10 years time, whether it's personally or whether it's more from society as a whole. Any additional requests on a wish list of measures of success, Alessandro? Yes, it's a lot of talk about citizens taking responsibility for their actions. And I truly believe that what I do and my kids do will have an effect. But in 10 years from now I wish that all governments, for instance China and all the big nations will also have banned all the trade with threatened species. I don't think there's any person on this planet who's dependent on shark fins, for instance, in their daily soup. Yes. That's good, comment on that. We agree. The panel, the oracles agree. Let's take a few more, in the middle here. Any more, raise your hands, don't be shy. Hello again. I have a bit of a provocation to ask, we are always talking about consumers taking, having the options on contributing on this. But for example, we know that, for example, the tropics contain a huge portion of our biodiversity. And it's also where all the developing countries and poor countries are. And how much changing just the consumption in this in here or in the developed countries would actually have a proper effect on global when the developing countries and even the US now that backed out of the Paris Accord and all that will have a real impact on it because forests are being cut down for palm oil, for swipe plantation and all that. And how do we really tackle these things? It's important to restore environments globally all around, but can we really change these things without addressing like worldwide hunger and poor conditions of living? Thank you. So picking up, so there's a critical issue here obviously that lies at the heart of all of these environmental goals is that we can do things at home and we need to do things abroad given the fact that so many of our impacts are displaced. And Mark, you said earlier that you often feel you often feel relieved if you like maybe that you're in the good team because Sweden has a positive contribution to so many environmental negotiations. But many Swedes are surprised to learn that if you look at the living planet index then Sweden is amongst some of the worst performers alongside countries like Qatar. And that's of course because Sweden is a heavily import dependent nation. Yet nevertheless somehow Sweden has managed to project itself, done a very good branding exercise as being very green. And Sweden has an ultra ambitious generational goal that includes these displaced overseas impacts which is astonishingly ambitious. And in the context of goals that you can deliver on versus goals that you can't, maybe Mark you could reflect a little bit on that because I know this is the heart of some of what you do. Yeah, thank you. I think we're not only ambitious, we're extremely privileged as well. I mean, there's 20 of us for each square kilometer which is really nothing. So there's plenty of space to produce things. And still we have a problem when it comes to forestry we cannot produce everything. We cannot do everything with the forest that we would like to do. So when you look at the rest of the world it's of course even more complicated. So it's easy to be the good guys if you're in this kind of position. I think there's a lot of very interesting things happening in tropical countries as well. And they're really trying new approaches, especially in South America. There's several countries who really don't like the concept of ecosystem services and they're trying to find other ways to look upon nature. And I think it was Ecuador who gave nature herself, right as a human being. So nature can speak in law cases, which is really great. It still has to turn out into something tangible but it's a new way of thinking. And I think it was also in Ecuador where they tried maybe the very opposite way. They tried to find financing. They have a great nature reserve somewhere in the Amazon where there's a lot of oil. And they said, well, we calculate that the amount of oil is worth so and so much. I don't remember the figure. It was a large figure. I mean, compared with Norway and so on, you know that these are high figures. And they said, well, the Ecuadorian government is, we are prepared to pay for half of that. So if we can get the amount of money, which is half the amount that we would get if we sold the oil, we won't exploit this area. Which of course is a very economic way to do it. I'm afraid they didn't get that. So we are still not there. But there's a lot of very interesting things happening in tropical countries. I think when it comes to palm oil and deforestation, it's also, this is I think one of the challenges in the sustainable development goals. There's not just ecology. There's also no hunger. There's also no poverty and so on. So there's a lot of things. So we really have to make sure that the countries where we have most of the biodiversity somehow can make a good living out of the biodiversity without destroying it. And I think that's a task for all of us. So we're at time. So we're kind of at the end of the discussion part of this. But what I would like to do to wrap up, because Mark was starting to speak to hope and from hope obviously can come optimism. It'll be just interesting to hear. I think it was Lisa and you that made the point that ultimately we're all individuals. Whether you're a banker or a bureaucrat, we're all individuals and we're all driven and motivated by particular personal experiences or examples that we've heard. So just be good to have very quick short statements and examples of hope due to a particular observation or particular experience, particular project with regards to the conservation of biodiversity in this rapidly changing world. And let's start with people in the room and panel, you can have a few more moments if you have a particular inspiration of hope to share. And let's just go around and let's close on that note of hope, which is often something that we leave behind. So who would like to go first? I think I'm starting to develop a little bit of hope when I see people discussing that certain brands are more sustainable than others and things. But in this context, I'm still a bit worried that the rate of consumerism... Okay, only the hope, please, not the caveat. So any more examples of hope? Don't be shy, one over there and then in the middle. Short, please. Yes, I did my bachelors on urbanization and insect pollination and I learned that urban environments are actually great places to conserve insect biodiversity and it made me really happy that it doesn't have to be all bad. Okay, excellent. Urban biodiverse, yes, please. There are quite a few examples of large birds and large mammals that we just stopped shooting them then their populations are increasing tremendously. Like, look at all the geese traveling over the skies and the cranes and lots of birds, which have become very much more common. Because we've stopped shooting them. Moosa common now, because we have good management. Okay, great. Just stop shooting things, it's a good place. Straight forward. Any more examples of hope? Come on, let's build up. Thank you, Linda, please. Yes, so there are a lot of good initiatives in the civil society I'd like to raise. One is the Swedish Society for Nature Conservation that does great work with kids that go out into nature, two to five-year-olds or sometimes six-year-olds and we go out together and look at insects and whatever spiders, they love it. So it's great and it's always really crowded. So Camille, Linda's already mobilizing the kids. More examples of hope, please. Keep your arms high so I can see them and we can get them mic'd, yes. Yeah, I feel a lot of hope when I have been seeing these young people who have been striking outside rikstogen.com and this is spreading throughout the world. That's great. And I know that there are some young people in the room here, so keep up the good work. Keep up striking. More examples, two more from the audience. Any more takers? Right at the back left there, please. I have a little hope that next November's elections will begin to mitigate the climate denial in the US government. Excellent, that's not, that is hopeful. Let's turn to the panel. Any final reflections of hope you'd like to share? Whoever would like to go first? Please, please. Well, this conference is nice. We are starting to talk more about biodiversity. As someone said in the beginning, biodiversity is not being at the same level of attention as climate change. And we need to get there. And it feels, it's coming, especially with the new IPES reports that have come this year and the global one that will come, is it this year or next year? So there seems to be increasing. More discussion, by the way. OK, great. Any other contributions? Yeah, I think there's a lot of very good things happening out there. In the real life, so to speak, outside of bureaucracy, and combining that with very high targets within bureaucracy, I think this will make things happen, not as fast as we want to, but they will happen. And I also think another optimistic part is that this, speaking about biodiversity, is no longer a suspect thing to do. It's becoming mainstream. Yeah, OK, thank you. Well, I think I mentioned a lot of mine. I really, really, it actually changed my life around to go to the Copenhagen conference a few years ago. I was getting very, I was actually going to quit the research I was doing. I was sick of it, I was sick of the arguing and nothing happening and no action being taken. And I go to the Copenhagen conference and all of these very young people, like 17 to 22, with all this hope and energy and motivation. And so it's like, OK, and they were like, you can't quit. You've got to keep going because we have to have your information. And it's like great if they can be this energetic and powerful and they are going to change the world, then the world will change. So the young people are who give me hope. Great. Louise, do you want the last word? Well, I think I feel hope for the consumer and corporate activism. And I'm already standing here thinking about the upcoming butterfly campaign. It's going to be global. Excellent. I'll help. Well, thank you very much. On that, I would like to thank the preceding speakers, my colleague, Frederick, and the panel here, Louise, Mark, Tuya, and of course, Camille. Thanks to all of you for what I think has been a very invigorating and thought-provoking discussion. And thanks, of course, to our hosts in the Swedish Academy and to all of those who've helped execute this. And as is always the case, there are people that lie behind the scenes that actually do the work. It's a lot of work to put on an event like this. I would also like to thank my colleague, Anna Lee, who asked me not to thank her. But let's give a round of applause. And of course, for the co-hosts at Stockholm University and the various representatives, Lisa and Frederick, and many of you in the audience, I think, who've come from different parts of the university to support this. And I understand that there is not about to offer a reception that doesn't exist. There is a reception. Please stay, mingle, share ideas of hope, of inspiration, of motivation, and keep the conversations going forwards. Thank you very much.