 It's good to be back in the country that's home to the mighty Yellow and Yangtze rivers, but as our hosts know well, the Yangtze was a little too mighty 20 years ago. In the summer of 1998, it rained heavily. For over six weeks, water poured over the banks of the Yangtze, destroying everything on its path. It was one of the worst floods in modern Chinese history. By the time it was over, many homes were lost, many lives were lost. Authorities set out to understand what was the cost of such destruction, because many people remembered worse storms that caused less damage. And it didn't take them long to figure out what happened. In the years leading up to the flood, prosperity had come to the country, causing development that disrupted the balance between people and nature. To meet the needs of a growing nation, upstream forests had been cut down, and grasslands had been overgraced, which destroyed the ability of these ecosystems to absorb the excess water. At the same time, to meet the increasing demand for housing, people had been building homes and communities over wetlands, which are a great natural buffer against storm surges. Because in large part of the loss of these ecosystems, the Yangtze 1998 floods cost $20 billion in damages, and more than 3,000 lives were lost. One of the things I love about Chinese culture is that its major spiritual traditions, Taoism, Buddhism, Confucianism, revere balance. They all teach the importance of living in harmony with nature and all living things. And that teaching is more important now than ever before, because the devastation, the loss of ecosystems that we saw in 1998 in the Yangtze are happening at a global scale. That means that we are risking similar types of devastation. And we can boil it down to one thing, our planet is becoming less wild. We are totally out of balance with nature. And unless we get our balance back, human society, as we know it, is going to be short-lived. Let me give you an example of this in balance. Today, 96% of the mass of mammals is us and our domesticated livestock. 70% of all birds are now domesticated poultry, mostly chickens. And in the oceans, 90% of the large fish have been extracted by fishing in the last century alone. Yet only 7% of the ocean surface has been designated or proposed as protected areas. And only 2% of the surface of the ocean is fully protected from fishing or other activities. We are doing a little better on the land, yet only 15% of the land is in protected areas like national parks or nature reserves. That means that ecosystems around the world are under serious threat. Now let me give you one example. The Amazon. The Amazon forest is one of the richest and most productive regions on the planet. It is so rich and diverse that you can find more species in a single Brazil nut tree than in an entire hectare of European soil. And one of the reasons for this richness is that it gets such heavy rain. And here is an interesting thing about this rain. The forest creates a rain. Trees absorb water from the ground and in the tropical heat release it as water vapor through the leaves. That water vapor will rise eventually condense and fall as rain, which lowers air pressure, drawing in more moisture from the Atlantic Ocean, which will fall as rain and it will get into the ground and the forest will absorb it and so on and so forth. But now we are destroying the Amazon forest at the highest rate in recent decades. The equivalent of two football fields per minute. And study suggests that if we cut down more than 20% of the current Amazon forest, that cycle will break. The forest will not be able to produce enough rain and it will turn into a savannah. And that will affect the entire planet. There is a moral argument, clear moral argument against this type of devastation. But let's stick for now with the economic argument. Ecosystems and the species that live in them are our life support system. It is these other species that produce the oxygen that we breathe. They pollinate our crops. They filter the clean water that we drink. They protect us from devastating floods. And wild places are the single best hope against climate catastrophe. We are spending resources in developing miraculous technologies that are going to suck our carbon pollution from the atmosphere. But we already have these technologies. Our forests, grasslands, wetlands and ocean habitats absorb half of the excess CO2 that we expel into the atmosphere every year. Without intact wild places, it will be impossible to achieve the Paris climate goals. Yet we are systematically destroying these ecosystems. The environment, our natural capital, every year provides 72 trillion dollars in free support to the global economy. To put that into context, imagine that we combine the GDPs of China, the United States and Japan. Now double the number. That's how much value we get from the environment every year. But our overuse of natural resources are costing us six trillion dollars per year. And the number could go up to 30 trillion by 2050. A world above two degrees Celsius is not insurable. The CEO of one of the big insurance companies said that. That world without wild places is not even investable. The good news is that protecting ecosystems can provide greater value than destroying them. We just need to give ecosystems the space they need to recover from our abuse and continue providing for us. And I know because I have seen it. Let me give you an example. In 1999, this little place called Cabo Pulmo in Mexico was an underwater desert. The fishermen were so upset with not having enough fish to catch that they did something that nobody expected. Instead of going out and trying to catch the few fish left, they decided to stop fishing completely. They created a national park in the sea, a no-take marine reserve. We went back 10 years later, and this is what we saw. We saw it go from degraded to pristine in just 10 years, including the return of the large predators like the groupers, sharks, and jacks. And you know who else is thriving? Those visionary fishermen who are now making more money from tourism inside the reserve and better fishing around it. And I've seen similar examples around the world. On average, the biomass of fish is six times larger inside reserves than outside. And the economic benefits from tourism can be enormous. The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park brings in five billion dollars to the Australian economy every year. That's 35 times more than fishing and many more jobs. And in the United States, every dollar invested by the U.S. government on our national parks produces 10 dollars in economic revenue to the local economy. The problem is that we don't have enough protected areas. So how much of the planet we need to protect? Studies suggest that if we want to avoid the extinction of one million species and all the benefits they provide, if we want to avoid the collapse of our life's super system, if we want a world not exceeding two degrees Celsius, we need to go renewable in terms of energy, but also we need to use half of the planet in a more responsible way and keep the other half in natural state. And to achieve that, we need to commit together to protect 30 percent of our planet by 2030. The People's Republic of China has embarked on an ecological redlining exercise and committed to protect a quarter of its lands and 30 percent of its coastal waters. That's an area larger than Greenland. These are ambitious targets, but some will say it's impossible. Why? Because we need more land and we need to fish more to feed 10 billion people. But we already produced enough food for 10 billion people. We just waste a third of it from the field to the table and we make other senseless decisions along the way. If we just became a little smarter about the way we eat and produce our food, we could have both a healthy planet and a healthy food supply. But some will say, oh, it's impossible. It's going to cost too much. We cannot afford it. Well, you know how much money governments spend to subsidize mostly destructive practices around the world every year? Thirty-five billion dollars. Studies show that protecting 30 percent of the planet would cost on the order of tens of billions of dollars. And guess what is the price of subsidies for fossil fuels? Every year, governments subsidize the fossil fuel companies directly, pre-tax, with 300 billion dollars. Plus, we need to add five trillion dollars with which society subsidizes the cost of burning fossil fuels every year. That's numbers from the International Monetary Fund. The money is there. We just use it to fund the activities that destroy our natural capital, that destroy our life support system. But you know the really good news that protection generates more value than destruction. New York decided that instead of spending 10 billion dollars building a wastewater treatment plant to produce clean tap water for the city, the city decided to spend only two billion dollars protecting the natural water supply, the cat's kills, the mountains and forest north of the city. And now, New York has the reputation of having the cleanest and most drinkable tap water in any large city in the United States. That's the same value realized by the Chinese government after the 1998 floods. Realizing that future rains could create similar types of devastation, local authorities brought in environmental scientists to help restore the ecosystems along the Yangtze to provide that natural protection from floods. It would have been more cost effective to keep those ecosystems in place, but I hope we can learn from these lessons. I was in Beijing a month ago meeting with leaders from the Chinese Academy of Sciences who are looking at ways to reconcile economic development and ecosystem protection. And I am optimistic and hopeful that China will be able to achieve those ambitious targets for protection and that vision of ecological civilization as a day to day reality and not just as an ideal. And China is not alone. We just conducted a survey on 12 countries of the five different continents and people around the world believe that we have already protected 30 percent of the planet and they overwhelmingly agree that we need to protect half of the planet. Next year we have a historic opportunity. China is hosting a historic conference of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity in the city of Kunming in October 2020. That's the place and the time where the world can come together and agree to protect at least 30 percent of our planet, land and seas by 2030 as a milestone. But not only governments have something to do here. Everybody can help. The World Economic Forum is launching an initiative called Business for Nature this week and I hope that all of your companies will join and commit to it. They will advocate for the shift that I mentioned. And I know that you are not used to hear good news from scientists, but this is what I can tell you today. If we rise to the occasion, scientists will not have to ride the obituary of our planet and our kids will not look back at us angry and disappointed. Instead, we will tell stories like Cabo Pumos, stories of resurgence, stories of renewal, stories of people coming together to save the planet we love. I look forward to taking that journey with you. Thank you.