 Hello, everyone, and welcome to the 2022 Green Growth Summit. Welcome to those of you here in the room and to those of you joining us online. My name is Dave Keating. I'm a journalist based here in Brussels, and I'm going to be guiding us through today's discussions on climate and energy at the crossroads, how to deliver climate action and secure energy for Europeans and the world. Now, a lot has changed since last year's Green Growth Summit, which was still digesting the Fit for 55 package, which is implementing through legislation the EU's Green Deal. We're now living in rapidly changing times when it comes to energy, especially here in Europe. Russia's invasion of Ukraine on February 24th has triggered an energy crisis, prompting a wholesale change in thinking about Europe's energy security. That change in thinking was given voice in the repower EU plan, which was put forward by Commission President Ursula von der Leyen just days after the invasion of Ukraine. Now, that plan aims to reduce the EU's dependence on Russian gas by two-thirds by the end of this year and completely phase out those imports by 2020. In the short term, the big focus has been on replacing those Russian imports with imports of liquefied natural gas, largely from the United States. Now, von der Leyen has been keen to stress that the EU's climate goals for 2030 and 2050 will not be altered by this plan, but that instead the plan is strengthening Europe's ability to meet its targets. I just got back from Friday's European Council Summit in Prague, where this was very much the message that was being stressed by the EU's prime ministers and presidents. The climate goals are still on track and actually this weaning off of Russian energy will help us meet those goals. However, the reality is that this wholesale reimagining of Europe's energy security does put the EU's climate goals into question and we've already seen certain national governments in the EU questioning those climate goals and wanting to see them revised in light of the current energy security crisis. On one hand, repower EU is mobilizing a huge amount of financing and a new impetus for switching away from fossil fuels and it could actually accelerate Europe's climate action and mean that the targets could actually be revised up and be even more ambitious. But on the other hand, much of the initial investment is going into building new fossil fuel infrastructure like LNG regasification facilities at ports that could lead to a lock-in on fossil fuels that could make the existing targets harder to reach. Now tomorrow, energy ministers will be meeting in Prague to try to reach an agreement on a variety of unprecedented energy market interventions, all concerning fossil fuels. Climate issues do seem to be putting off to another day. In four weeks, the COP 27 UN Climate Summit will begin in Egypt and the big concern there is that countries are going to row back their climate commitments in light of the current energy security crisis. Some fear that this could be the COP that actually moves the world backwards in the climate fight. It's in this context that we're gathered here today, bringing together environment, climate and energy ministers, state secretaries, ambassadors, members of the European Parliament and business leaders to discuss how the EU can show global leadership in climate action and the clean energy transition, particularly through the repower EU plan and the Fit for 55 legislation now working its way through the legislature. We'll also have the presentation of a new corporate leaders group report on insights and lessons for successfully delivering the European Green Deal. Now, before we begin, a couple of quick housekeeping notes. Please keep the discussion going on Twitter. We wanna hear what you guys think. You can use the hashtag Green Growth Summit when you're tweeting about today's event. You'll also be able to ask your questions, whether you're here in the room or online. If you're online, you can ask your questions using the chat. You can put those in at any time. I'll be seeing them and I'll be asking those to the panelists. And also I'll be going to you guys here in the room if you have questions here. So we have the agenda for today, I think, on the screen. Ah, no, it's all right, but I can tell it to you anyway. So we're gonna start out with our high level speeches here at the beginning. Here we go. So the first session today is going to be looking at the big picture and we're going to get that presentation of the Corporate Leaders Group Report. Then we'll have two panels this afternoon. The first is on delivering an ambitious climate and energy secure common agenda through progressive policies and business action. And the second is on building blocks for a global energy transition and accelerated climate action. Couple of quick notes. If you need the fire escape, hopefully we won't need that. But if you do, it's that door right in the back. And also, of course, today's event is being recorded and live streamed. If you want to watch the recording afterwards, it will be available on the LinkedIn and YouTube channels of CLG. So let's now start with a word of welcome from Elliot Whittington, Director of CLG Europe and the Green Growth Partnership. Elliot? Thank you, Dave. And thank you everyone for being here. I am very much looking forward to today and looking forward to the conversations that we're due to have. I think it falls to me to say a few words of welcome on behalf of CLG Europe and on behalf of the Green Growth Partnership. And for those of you who don't know what those things are, because some of you might not, European Corporate Leaders Group is coming together of leading businesses from and with significant footprint in Europe to drive forward a positive partnership with between European business and European policymakers towards a more sustainable future economy for Europe. It has existed for 16 years and it has been driving that conversation actively. And over the last six or seven years, it has been in partnership with the Green Growth Group of Ministers, so climate and energy ministers from across Europe who have come together to support a more progressive outcome. And that's what the Green Growth Partnership is. And under that banner, we've been very pleased to host a series of Green Growth summits. And what I'm excited about today is actually that there's a couple of things that make this one particularly special, partly the moment that Dave just talked about and I'll talk about a little bit more in a second, but also the nature of the conversation. I think that it's great to be getting back into a face-to-face conversation. I know a number of you have probably missed that and I certainly have. And I think that ability to interact and talk about these things, but also because this is a hybrid summit, the fact that it's going to be one that allows participation from outside the room as well will be particularly valuable. And I think actually this is set up to be the biggest ever Green Growth Summit. So it's going to be the most, one of the most key and most influential in terms of the size of the audience, but also some of the significance of the topics that we're able to talk about. I'm very grateful in that context for the fact that the government and the environment and climate ministries of Finland and Germany have both made this moment possible. So I want to thank them for their support for this event. So we're here, we're in person, together we've gathered, we've got business leaders, we've got policy makers, we've got experts, we've got colleagues, we've got friends. And as Dave was talking about, I think this is going to be, this is a critical moment for the key conversation. We are in a crossroads. There is, this is the sense that energy topics, the decisions made now will define a future pathway for Europe and in terms of Europe's influence, which we just heard in terms of COP 27, but also in terms of investment decisions being made in Africa, in Asia and elsewhere for the world. So a lot is on the table at this moment. The corporate leaders group has tried to make its insights and positions clear on this. So over 150 business leaders wrote under the CLG's banner to European leaders arguing that climate needs to be at the heart of the Repower EU package and that the Repower EU and 555 need to be linked together and delivered in a synergistic and coherent way to make sure that Europe's climate goals were supported in advance rather than watered down. And we've also, as Dave was saying out, and as Santa will talk about in a second, tried to set out some lessons and insights for how the implementation of this agenda can be delivered effectively and in a way that secures the best benefits in terms of the European economy and the European people going forward. From my perspective, I think this is a moment where to navigate this sense of coming together crises, of an energy crisis, a cost of living crisis, of war on the borders of Europe, invasion on the borders of Europe and the need to advance in the face of climate change, it has to be a moment for tactical flexibility and strategic resolve. And I think with the introduction of the Repower EU, we've seen that reaching for that tactical flexibility, that response to the current moment, which I think is valuable. I think there's clearly debates and discussions we've heard from Prague and elsewhere about taking that further forward. But the need is to make sure that that's still, we don't step back on essential strategic goals and providing that kind of long-term clarity and direction in terms of Europe's energy goals, Europe's climate goals and Europe's economic goals which need to be pulling together. So I think this is the key moment to be discussing these topics and I think you are some of the most important people to be having that conversations. I'm very much looking forward to the conversation today. I'm very much looking forward to hearing what you've got to say and I wish you luck with the rest of the conversation. Thank you. Thanks very much, Elliot. So now, as promised, you guys are going to hear about the CLG report, Context is Everything. I would like to welcome to the podium, Sana Marcanen, Research Program Lead at the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership. And not to the podium, sorry, online. I forgot. Thanks, Dave and thanks, Elliot. Can you hear me okay? Okay. Great. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, everybody, depending on where you're joining from. My name is Sana Marcanen and as Elliot and Dave both mentioned before, I'm going to be presenting to you the key results from our 2022 CLG Europe flagship report called Context is Everything. We set out to identify the insights and lessons for successfully delivering the European Green Deal. And obviously, now that the situation has somewhat changed since what we had when we first set out to do this report, many of these lessons are relevant also for delivering on the Repare EU. So if you have my slides available, if you just move on to the next slide. So we know from previous, well, we know already that many climate policies are set out specifically to incentivize household and businesses to make more sustainable choices. And we know from previous policy evaluation and extensive research that these policies have so far had very mixed outcomes. And we wanted to improve our understanding of why. So we know obviously that policy design and policy implementation are hugely influential and important factors here. But we also wanted to look at what role the contextual factors and contextual conditions play in impacting the effectiveness or success of climate policies. Particularly by influencing the viability and the relative attractiveness of the more sustainable choices. So to this end, we carried out a literature review together with Cambridge Econometrics. And we also carried out together with our CLG members and various policy experts across Europe, five business case studies and 11 policy case studies to illustrate and really identify some of these key issues and how they play out in real life. And in our report, we focus specifically on policies that seek to directly influence the choices that businesses and households make in relation to buildings, energy, transport and circular practices. If I get the next slide, please. So as we already know, good policy design is an awfully important factor, but alone it doesn't actually guarantee policy success because the contextual factors that are within which these policies play out can either enable or hinder the policy effectiveness. And we identified the key contextual factors from literature into two main categories. Those that affect the ability and those that affect the willingness of businesses and households to make more sustainable choices. And the key factors that we identified as impacting on the ability of businesses and households to make more sustainable choices. So the first two are hardly surprising. Obviously income levels and access to finance or the cost of finance, as well as the cost of low carbon technologies, particularly the relative cost of low carbon technologies compared to more carbon intensive alternatives are hugely influential. However, institutional factors and governance mechanisms also play a key role and access to information and infrastructure, particularly hard infrastructure are also very important here. So a probably classic example here would be policies that seek to incentivize people to take up active transport or public transport, but without providing the relevant infrastructure that make those choices actually viable for large numbers of consumers. So the second category that we identified as being particularly important is the factors that influence the willingness of people and businesses to make more sustainable choices. And this includes primarily behavioral patterns which are very difficult to change because they're so deeply ingrained in our social norms and conventions. And they can be impacted and influenced by communication from external sources, but individual factors also play a role. So for example, tenants who do not own the properties that they occupy, whether they're businesses or households have a lot less ability to make choices regarding particularly major factors related to those properties such as energy efficiency or choice of heating fuel. Experiences are also hugely important. So experiences that influence people's awareness of the co-benefits of making more sustainable choices, but also the climate impacts of the choices that they're currently making. And this is where the neighborhood effect really comes to play when people are exposed to environment where they see others making more sustainable choices and potentially benefiting from them, they become more likely to make those choices themselves. So if we move on to the next slide, here is just a short, very small sample of the 16 different case studies that we included in our report. So we looked at renewable energy communities, particularly focusing on the contextual factors that have made renewable energy communities particularly popular in certain countries and a successful form for households in particular, but also businesses to access heating and hot water. One of our other examples was provided by a signify who's one of our business members looking at how EU funding was used by municipal governments in Poland to provide connected LED street lighting across various different municipalities in the country, leading to not just quite substantial cost savings in terms of operating costs, but also improved safety. And yet another case study, which is ongoing is sort of how a set of policies is being implemented in Denmark in an integrated manner to incentivize heat pump uptake by both households and in district heating. So if we go on to the next slide. So based on our case studies and our literature review, we drew nine, well, we drew some sector-specific policy learnings that you could read in the report they're fairly detailed and I'm not going to go through them here, but we also identified nine key policies, success factors. And so at the very high level and perhaps most importantly, climate policy instruments, particularly those that seek to identify or incentivize people and businesses to make more sustainable choices are most successful when they are aligned with the broader policy context and across different levels of governance. And when there is a clear and well-communicated vision, that also includes the communication of the associated benefits of those policies or those sustainable choices. These have been identified as key factors that made many of our case study examples particularly successful and are likely to make some incentives, some initiatives such as their heat pump deployment in Denmark more strong or a stronger policy than otherwise would be the case. A strong level of social trust was identified as being particularly important, enabling factor for renewable energy communities and deposit return schemes, which are both case studies in the report. The importance of a coherent policy alignment and strong policy synergies was illustrated, particularly in our case study of incentives for easy uptake in Norway and the use of wood in construction in France and Hamburg. Well resourced, empowered and coordinated institutions are particularly well illustrated by our case study of the Italian super bonus scheme and to an extent the impact that the lack of this resulted in the failure of the UK green homes grant last year. There's also been some evidence coming out of our case studies that positive policy outcomes are more likely to emerge when EU and national level targets and funding programs allow a certain degree of flexibility for local governments, particularly so that they can design policies in a way that enables them to address the specific goals and conditions that are meaningful for them in the local context and therefore meaningful for the local population as well. And this is again particularly well exemplified in the case study of residential building renovation policies in both Poland but also the LOD street lighting example. It's very important that we have multiple measures that are all designed to work together to support a common goal. And I'm not going to list all the case studies where this came across as one of the key findings but you can go through the report and there are many, many case studies that actually show how important it is not to just put one measure in place to achieve a specific outcome but look at what other measures could be also put in place to support that specific objective. And last but not least, our case studies highlight the importance of stakeholder engagement in the form of meaningful efforts to actually engage and listen to the people and businesses at the policy design and implementation stage particularly focusing on those who will be directly affected by these policies. So this is where I finish the overview of the report. I appreciate that it's a long report, about 45 pages but it's full of very exciting case studies. And I would like to thank all the partners that contributed in the drafting of those case studies as well as temperature econometrics. Thanks very much, Sana. I think it's particularly useful to know what worked as we look ahead here to know exactly what is working in terms of policy and also what needs improvement. And we'll be talking more about this report as we go on today. But next I would like to introduce our keynote speaker. We will hear a keynote speech from Pascal Confon, a French member of the European Parliament and chair of the Parliament's Environment and Committee. And he is from Manuel Macron's Renew Europe Group. Mr. Confon, I hand it over to you. Thank you, can you hear me well? Yes, we can. Okay, perfect. Thank you. So we are running a bit late, that would be very short. First, one key element of the context we are in is precisely to counter the narrative that is coming from part of the world starting with China that the EU would be backtracking on its climate objectives, minus 55 and climate neutrality 2050. Because of course, I would say that it is their interest to make the rest of the planet think that we are not going to deliver. So there is a clear battle, I would say, of narrative here. And I count on you as well to recall the fact that we haven't changed our climate law, we haven't changed our policies in a sense that we would backtrack on our climate policies. On the contrary, what I saw from the very beginning of this crisis from the energy angle. I'm sorry to interrupt real quick, can you turn on your camera? We think it's not on on your end. Okay, I don't know, share my camera, share my camera, it is. Yes, you're there, it's how we see it. Okay, so you didn't see me, but you... We heard you, yes. You heard, okay. So I keep on with now the facts. Exactly, thanks. So first element, a battle of narrative. We are not going to backtrack and we are not backtracking. I take very concrete examples of the fact that we are speeding up on renewable energies. We voted the 45% in the parliament coming from the commission. And now we negotiate with the council and there will be maybe needs for flexibilities here and there, but I think the political pressure on being and lending on 45% at the end will be stronger than the rest. We are speeding up as well on refurbishing and the financing of renovation, heat pumps, and so on and so on. We have clearly both in the council and in the parliament taken a position on the MSR, so the carbon market reform related to a remover, precisely not to take the risk of decreasing the level of carbon pricing we need because of this reform, but instead using this reform because we need this 20 billion to finance a repower, but making sure that it does not impact too much the carbon pricing. I could give you a lot of examples where we speed up at European level because of this crisis. Of course, there are other elements in the context that are less positive. To my view, the two obvious ones are coal on one side and the contracts we are signing on LNG with others. On coal, my understanding, including in the countries that are the most impacted by the crisis and will use coal as an alternative to gas, is that including in their mindset, it is a short-term fix and to be honest, maybe a needed fix, but it is limited and relatively small when it comes to the total of emissions that are covered. Second, LNG. Of course, we are renegotiating and negotiating additional gas contracts. And again, I can't see any alternative very short-term right now. As part of the answer, I say part of the answer because as I said at the beginning, then you have investment in renewables, the speeding up on permitting, energy efficiency, and so on, and so on. But part of the answer is true. Part of the answer is negotiating new LNG contracts. And then I must say that I'm worried about the fact that these contracts might not be compatible with the Green Deal medium-term. Short-term is another story, but medium-term, does it create a locking effect in gas infrastructures? To be honest, as the contracts are not public, I don't know. But the contracts are not the same with Norway, with Qatar, with the US, and so on. So at the end of the day, is it a medium-term game changer or is it a flexibility we need short-term? And then the plan will not be changed. And the countries that will have these contracts on the table will maybe have in 10 years time, depending on what happens in Russia, some sort of stranded assets there, we will see. But what I can tell you is that beyond these two elements, and there is no point in hiding them, but we need to put them into a broader context, where I think that the positive, if I may say so, impact for climate action or the positive rational for climate action regarding this crisis from the energy angle are much more numerous and strong than the negative ones. But I'm aware that there is a counter-narrative coming from some countries, and I said China, not only China, and that's why we definitely need to recall and recall and recall again that it is definitely not our intention. And that's why in conclusion, I would say that what we will say in Charmechek will be also of strategic nature. And that's why we are pushing hard with front-steer moments from the commission side and myself and a few other MEPs on the currency of the parliament side to be able to lend before Charme on some key texts of the climate package so that we would be able to go to COP 27 with final deals or at least political final deals even if technically speaking, still a couple of elements had to be discussed but the key elements negotiated from a political angle. That's the goal we have with front-steer moments and I hope that we will deliver, we still have one month and we are on track. Thank you. Thanks very much, Mr. Koffal. If you have time, I wanna put one question to you that's come in from the audience. It's a big picture question, it's from Benjamin Stewart. He asks, is the current situation a chance to reevaluate the climate change goals that we've set? Do you think that the current energy security situation we find ourselves in means that we need to reevaluate at EU level the climate goals that have been set? Well, as I said, if I can re-elaborate on this, I mean, what are we experiencing? We are experiencing a crisis on the energy crisis coming from fossil fuels, not from renewables or from energy efficiency or from a demon-sider reduction. I mean, all the key elements that are at the core of the climate policies related to energy are on the contrary at the core of our response. We need to speed up on renewables because it's also a matter of sovereignty. We need to speed up on energy efficiency. We need to speed up of everything which is related to the Green Deal to decrease the dependency we have to fossil fuels. And the decision made by the OPEC countries recently is another signal in that direction that one of the key elements of our strategic autonomy is precisely connected to less dependency not only from Russian fossil fuels, but from fossil fuels as a whole. And that's why we now are pushing hard on the agenda connecting decarbonization and strategic autonomy. That's why there will be in the next weeks slash months an important initiative regarding not only the downstream meaning batteries or wind farms and so on, but also upstreams on our capacity to have a better control of the value chain on key elements like rivers and so on and so on connected to the green transition because obviously the stupid thing would be to replace one dependency with another. So dependency on fossil fuel coming from XYZ with dependency on raw material, critical raw materials coming from XYZ. So that's exactly what we want to avoid. That's why after the downstream key regulations, we are on top of that adding an upstream strategy to make sure that we have again a better control on the key critical value chain for the transition. Not only for the transition, you have chips and so on of course with the teleboton, but also and starting with the transition regarding batteries, magnets, electrolyzers and so on, which are key industrial goods of the decarbonization pathway. So I can tell you that we are definitely not backtracking and I don't see any reason to do so. And I would see many reasons to on the contrary speeding up to be more sovereigns, less dependent and on top of that, looking at what happened this summer being more resilient. And that's why as well, we are trying to now to push the commission in not only the mitigation agenda which is obviously the key one, but also to the adaptation and resilient agenda because we saw this summer, that's all the key infrastructures, for instance, energy, rivers and so on and so on could be at risk in terms of climate shock impact. So that's why I think we definitely need as well to speed up and to move forward on and resilient EU level, EU wide policies because at that stage, it's rather weak. To be honest, it's rather weak and I think we really need to use the shock of this summer to make sure that we draw the lessons and we move forward also on that pillar of climate policies. So indeed an opportunity perhaps to revise up the EU's climate targets, but definitely not revise. That's why, if I may say what, I mean, we in the negotiation we are in, you know that the climate law we negotiated is not 55. The climate law we negotiated at the end is 50, it's close to 57. So that's the whole point in being able to demonstrate that we are actually finally negotiating close to 57% prediction because that could be a strong message for Shaman Shah. Yeah, that's a good point. Well, thank you very much, Mr. Confant for giving us your thoughts this morning. We're now going to move on to session one, our first panel. I would invite the panelists to come here on stage and take your seats. So this session is on delivering an ambitious climate and energy secure common agenda through progressive policies and business action. The panelists we have here in the room are Raul Fuentes Milani, Ambassador and Deputy Permanent Representative of Spain to the European Union. We have Serpip Petkinan, Member of the European Parliament and who sits on the committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs from the Center Right EPP. We have Kerry Kausi, President of Ball Beverage Packaging. We have Julie Kestrup, Head of EU Affairs at Velux. And we have Esther Asin from WWF's European office. But first, we have joining us remotely, Sven Giegeld, State Secretary for the Federal Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Action for Germany. Mr. Giegeld, thank you so much for joining us today. I'll hand it over to you first. Tell us a little bit about your vision for all of these different elements, the repower EU plan fit for 55, COP 27. Where do you think we're heading? So, thank you for giving me the floor. Can you hear me okay? Yes, we can. Yeah, so first of all, welcome. And it's great to see Serpip again. I have to say I miss you. And also special greetings to Madame Kestrup. We just used a lot of Velux windows to refurbish ecologically an old farmhouse. I have to tell you, they work very well. I'm not sure whether this is allowed to say, but we are very happy with these wooden versions of your windows. Anyway, let me stop joking and thank you for this timely event. I think it is really important to raise that issue now because obviously Europe is under severe pressure. And as usual in these situations, there are also forces, which think this is now the time to be less ambitious on the green deal, less ambitious on green growth markets. And we believe this would be absolutely the opposite of what we should draw as a conclusion from the current situation. The climate targets go very well with our objective to get rid of our dependence on Russian imports of raw materials and energy. And they are also very much adapted to become climate neutral, more resilient and finally also prosperous in the midterm. And therefore the green growth agenda, the green deal agenda is exactly what we need now. If we wouldn't have the green deal in this situation, it had to be invented now because the green deal agenda is the through future growth agenda. And this holds true for the climate pillar, but also for the other pillars like the circular economy, the protection of biodiversity and the anti-pollution part. Therefore, I have to say that I'm concerned by plans to drop the zero pollution action plan or parts of it, such as the reach reform. Sustainable chemicals are a key pillar for sustainable growth markets, opening these markets and allowing by reducing red tape to define future chemical markets in Europe based on the objectives of the green deal, including reducing toxic, is not the burden for our industry. It is in the end a promise for the future of the chemical industry in Europe. And therefore I would call on the commission to remain bold also in this area of zero pollution. And this of course is also true when it comes to air and water and soil pollution. Where we see that our markets are failing to ensure a climate neutral and sustainable economy, we simply need a stricter regulation as well as market incentives in order to produce these growth markets also in the future in Europe. And we should not here concentrate one-sidedly on imposing costs because we tend to overlook the avoided costs first for the ecosystem, but also when it comes to the economy as well as when it comes to a competitiveness in future markets. And this holds true for all the different pillars of the green deal. And therefore is the green deal is also the right agenda when looking from a perspective of global competitiveness. If we get it right as EU, we can be a global leader on clean products and technologies and secure our also industrial future. The US example of the inflation reduction act is a good example for our need to act. Europe needs to find an answer to this initiative to keep financial investment and industrial investment in sustainable clean transformation technologies such as wind, solar, green hydrogen, electrolyzers, heat pumps large and small and its respective green infrastructure in Europe. And that is why we have proposed and I'm glad that the commission and several member states have taken that up a European platform for transition technologies where Europe pulls its capacity in research, in industry and also in good governance in order to create by growing these future technologies, these transformation technologies a win, win, win situation which also contributes to European sovereignty and economic sustainable growth. And let me further dive a bit into climate and energy. So only to be very clear the famous policies of energy vendor and climate protection in Germany. So energy transition, they are, we are following them with great energy and vigorously. We have made some concessions for the short term when it comes to increasing LNG imports, letting some coal power plants run longer and also considering to let some nuclear energy facilities run longer because they may well be needed to guarantee stability in the energy system in particular with a view to the problems of nuclear in France. But Germany is sticking and following even more vigorously its energy transition agenda. We know that nuclear is expensive environmentally as well as financially. And therefore we are working towards 100% renewable energy system and this is what we do. And we will also face out coal earlier than originally planned by the former commission. You perhaps have heard that the largest, one of the largest energy companies in the coal sector, RWE has just committed to face out coal until 2030 rather than 38. So we are holding course, don't get misunderstand what we do as emergency measures and what we are doing in order to secure future energy policies. Lastly on the fit for 55 and repower EU package. We support that we move forward as Pascal just explained, as fast as possible with the package. And we are also looking positively to the idea of taking some elements out of the package to be ready to present them and Shamil Sheikh as agreed, such as the ESR or also Lulu CF. And we try to speak to the Czech presidency. I know the commission is doing this as well to speed up in order to have positive news from Europe for the negotiations on the global level. When it comes to the European package, for us it is essential that the package is agreed in its core as one package. This means we need the market-based elements like ETS one and two to keep them together. We should not weaken the market-based instruments by taking out sectors. This is critical for us, but we are ready of course to and in the current situation of high energy prices to negotiate for safeguards for citizens that they will not be hit at the moment by additional costs, which is unlikely to happen anyway because ETS two will only be introduced later on as it was always planned. But it is important that regulatory measures and market-based instruments will stay together. And this is also the basis to agree on the European Social Climate Fund. This means for us ETS two and the European Social Climate Fund as well as CBERM and the reform of ETS one is one package and it has to remain one package. And lastly on repower, we supported the financing of the repower package. This is important to become more independent and Germany agreed to this, even if it comes with a net payment costs also in a well above a billion, but this is a highly needed measure in solidarity for investment. And these measures of course have to be designed in a way that they do not create as Pascal was rightly pointing out new locking effects. So the new infrastructure which we are creating has to be effectively and not theoretically but effectively ready for the hydrogen systems we will need in the future. And therefore we believe that we have to make sure that for the spending of the money, it is important that we keep the integrity of the Green Deal ideas also in the spending of that package, but we support it and have to do also what we can in order to ensure that the remaining obstacles for renewables in Europe, such as in the permitting field, are addressed in the same cycle when we increase additionally the targets for the renewable energy directive to 45% as Pascal was just pointing out. So let's be bold to build our green future markets. Let's not get distracted by short-term arguments. If Europe acts together boldly, we can make Europe the growth pole for sustainable industry and ambitious climate protection. And therefore thank you for that event. Thanks very much, Secretary Gygott. Let me ask you a follow-up question because I know you have to leave shortly. You mentioned that you want the core of the Fit for 55 package to stay together, although some international elements like Lulu CF can be stripped out. The fact is that the EU will be going to Sharmal shake without that package being agreed yet. So what can the EU do there at COP 27 to make sure that countries worldwide don't backtrack, especially when, whether it's accurate or not, there is an impression out there in the international media that the EU is reevaluating its climate goals. We're hearing this a lot. I'm hearing this a lot from third country diplomats from outside Europe. How can the EU enter that COP 27 summit dispelling that idea and saying that the EU is acting on climate when that Fit for 55 package hasn't been adopted yet? I must say by countering that wrong spin because I don't see that happening actually. I see that we are replacing with record speed fossil imports from Russia. And I see the continuity of strategies to reduce also CO2 emissions. And of course, by presenting an adopted ESR plus Lulu CF, we could present in Sharmal shake as Pascal was pointing out that we go beyond the 55% towards 57. So we would be at least one important continent which comes forward with higher ambition. However, ETS1, ETS2, and the climate social fund plus CBAM, this is technically too complex to be adopted until beginning of November. This would simply not work. I think that is, but by abiding to and presenting also with self confidence our plans, I think we can be credible. And second, of course, we have to keep our promises for supporting the developing countries with their ambitions. So there are promises from Glasgow to be met. Well, thanks very much, Secretary Giegel, for giving us your thoughts. I'm gonna move on to the panelists here in the room. I'd like to start out with Ambassador Fuentes Milani. Tell us about the Spanish perspective on delivering ambitious climate and energy policies for the EU. And also, like we were just talking about how to motivate the global conversation. I think if you flip it up, it should be, hopefully. If you flip the switch up, I think it'll work. Yes. Excellent. Well, thank you very much for this opportunity of being with you. And well, trying to share with you our vision from Spain and also my experience working in the county. So, well, the first thing, we all agree about the challenging context, how important it is that we move towards our climate goals. We are facing now a very critical geopolitical context. We all agree, it's COVID, it's Ukraine, it's the food security, it's the fertilizers now. So, I mean, we all agree about that. We also all agree, and I think I share this vision with all member states sitting in the council, that climate change needs to be tackled. We are facing a dreadful situation. Our experiences during the summer show that climate change is moving at an increased pace. And so we all agree, Spain first, but also my colleagues in the council, we all agree that we need to move forward. So, on this, I do agree, I do believe that we are all on the same page. Now, second point that I was listening attentively to Pascal Canfan and also to the Secretary of State. Is the EU backtracking? Well, I don't think the EU is backtracking in this regard. I fully agree with the point about the Secretary of State, the Gemma Secretary of State. I really do not see that. On the contrary, I see we are moving forward even more quickly. And it's very important that we need all of you to keep our credibility. And our credibility means, first, the goals. The goals are clearly established in the climate law, and we are not backtracking from those. Also, we are negotiating currently these renewable energy directive and so on. There are important goals there to be preserved and we will do our utmost to do it. Secondly, calendar. Calendar is very important and I will come to that in a second when I will refer to the negotiation of the FIT455 package. It's very important that we work together with Parliament in order to speed the process. And thirdly, public support. This is something that as a Spanish representative, I need to convey to you. It's important that our citizens see the benefits of climate change, of moving towards a new system based on renewables as regards the energy system and that governments, administrations provide the buffers for them to wade through the difficult moments that are suffering now. So I come quickly to two points. First, the FIT455 package and then the energy. As regards the package, okay, we need to admit that we made enormous progress during the last semester. Out of 14 proposals, the French presidency was able to agree in Council 11 of them. So I mean, I think this is absolutely unprecedented. It was massive and the challenge now is to move together with Parliament in order to find an agreement on the package as soon as possible. Is it going to be a global one package or is it going to be agreed on stages? Well, we had this discussion once and again in Council and at the end, well, we saw that many of the proposals are interconnected. It's very difficult, obviously, to find an agreement on the social climate fund without an agreement on TS2. And difficult to agree on TS2 if you don't agree on TS1. So very probably I say that we need to build kind of a very extensive package for this to work and we will do that. Now, when can we do it? Well, we need to admit and I share this feeling with you. We need to admit that we are not progressing maybe at the pace that we would want to at the moment. We need to accelerate the trial with Parliament. And I am sure my Mr. Canfan will agree to this. And I tell you because, and I see this also from the point of view of the future president of Correpe. We will have limited time during the second semester of 2023. If by then parts of the TS, part of the 5th or 55th package are not agreed, then we will not be able to address issues such as reach or the waste package put forward by the Commission or many other elements of the Zero Pollution Action Plan. So from the point of view, I'm talking here, I'm sharing a feeling maybe as a bureaucrat with you, but we see that, I mean, for us, hours are limited. And if we do not put some of the work behind us, we won't be able to address the other very important files that we will have on the table. So let this be a plea also for our colleagues in Parliament to move together and find an agreement as soon as possible, if possible, if possible during the Czech presidency so that during the Swedish and Spanish presidencies we can move towards other files. So on energy, well, on energy we have in Spain, we have a very ambitious agenda centered on four pillars, energy savings, renewable energies, new energy vectors and strategic autonomy. And we have a solid roadmap with cross-cutting strategic guidelines and sectoral roadmap side. I am not going to come to all the details, but I will tell you, I mean, in our plans, primary energy consumption would be reduced by 90% in 2050. And we are moving in that direction and currently renewables account for more than 45% of the energy generation in Spain. So I believe we can, I'm sure that we will be there. Renewables in our plans need to account for 97% of final energy consumption by 2050. And we are also working in the industrial component. Other speakers mentioned before the importance of the strategic autonomy. For us, it is key, 90% of the components of our wind farms are produced in Spain. More than 60% of the components in our photovoltaic systems are produced in Spain. And we produce 90% of the electronics linked to the exploitation of these fields. So, okay, there is still some way to go, but of course, we also need to realize that we are in a global economy, even if we need to underline that we need to be as autonomous as possible. Okay, we cannot be 100%. So now we have this energy situation. We are moving quickly in the council, but I can also assure you that Spain was an early mover in this regard. First, avoiding the contagion effect of gas in the electricity market. As we put together this so-called Iberian mechanism in order to decouple the electricity price from the price of gas, redistributing in a socially fair way the extraordinary profits resulting from the world. This, again, we had a regulation adopted in the last energy council. We also had moved in this regard in Spain, reducing a VIT on electricity to 10% a few months ago, but also putting in place a clawback system of the wind for profits of electricity companies and energy companies and trying to redirect them to the consumers. So, of course, looking particularly to vulnerable consumers is very important, but we need to also look at the medium term and understand that if now, today, we need to work on the security of supply on providing some support to vulnerable consumers. In the long term, we need to go to the electricity market. We need to find a sustainable way to run our energy system, and this is something that we are committed to do in Spain, and I am sure that in the council we will find the adequate forum to move the discussion forward. Thanks very much. I think it's worth pointing out that many of those Spanish ideas you mentioned are now being embraced at EU level, which has been an interesting evolution. Serpent but kind, and let's go to you next. I saw you nodding when the point has been made so far that we can deliver climate goals and energy security goals at the same time. So how exactly do we do that through EU policy delivering both of those goals at the same time? Yes, and actually indeed how it is already hinted here and said you cannot achieve neither of these goals if you do not do them simultaneously. And I can't vision or see any kind of the future where we would stop the investment on renewables and energy efficiency and to have a profitable economy ahead of us. And why? Let's pick up a couple of figures. After the COVID-19, there's extensive economic studies. Of course, they are guessing they are not the truth, but it gives the pretty good guess where we are going. And if we do not speeden up our climate actions, the climate cost is going to be tenfold at least to COVID-19 cost globally to all of our economies. And the question should be, can we afford that? And that's why what some of us in the parliament has been pushing for, haven't got it through yet is the cost of non-action. There's a lot of modeling about the cost of non-action but it is still not made in the EU budget very same as the national budgets on our legislation, for example, like the FIT455. Well, the second that I would like to point out is set the bar right and avoid the sidetracks because they are too expensive and you never can get out of there before you would need to have the sustainable investments. Well, we Nordics are famous about our bioenergy and it's always wise thing to increase wood burning and Germans are pretty good on just tweaking the diesel cars slightly better and saying that this will do the trick and so on and so on, the Netherlands and the agriculture. So we all have our own planes. And that actually, that you invest something that is slightly better than what you are doing now is like running fast but to the wrong direction. And then you can't get it out and you do not have the money for investment. So please do not listen politics, listen science. And if the science can tell you that we would need to by 2050 to have 10-fold resource efficiency because otherwise we would need to have more than three planets worth resources and this is not going to happen. If the science tells you that the fit for 55 is not adequate. So why do you go forth and expect that that probably will happen that then we tighten up the rules after five years and this is in security for investors and in security for the businesses. So look at the science, do the best what is required and if you do not know what that is, this gives at least a better time to think what you should be doing because if you are in oil business probably you would need to de-invest and find something else. You'd just sort of a go on as business is usually in many models of our economies. Okay, then actually kick the politicians and kick them with the re-power EU. It entails the most effective elements. As you might know, the buildings are responsible for 40% of energy consumption. And if we would dirt as we could, at least in five years, but probably already in three years, all that building, not 100% but around 70% to be energy positive. So producing the energy for the net, not using it by doing this deeper innovation on energy efficiency, no, the 45, it's better. We are doing the better than what we've been doing but it's too little too late. It should be the best available and it should be total energy positiveness in all where it is possible, plus then the solar panels, wind and heating and cooling systems. Then, and we do have even the money because we have the renovation fund, we do have the social fund, we do have the money for RR on this revitalization. The question is not that we wouldn't know what to do, not that we wouldn't have the technology, not that it would be good business for someone. And it's not even that we wouldn't have the money for that. Well, why don't we do? Why the member states are dragging their legs? Because they have so much negative lobbying. If you would be a thin and hear all that lobbying about forest policy, you would think that the EU is a dragon that is going to come up and eat you and the web should be sort of a defending on this horrible situation. And probably it is just the same in all of the member states. And I'm getting more than 70% of my contacts from businesses from the negative side, telling, no, no, no, no, no, can't do too expensive, too impossible. We need to sort of a back off now with the Ukrainian war. No, no, no, no, no, we are already the best, you can't sort of a better perfection already. And if you do get the other kind of the message from the business, telling that, yes, we can do it. Actually, it's profitable for us. It's the money is not going to go to a black hole. It's going to go to new types of the businesses. And that's the beauty of the market economy. It's always profitable. The question is just do them now. Then actually renewables increase. You always hear the story that they decrease the by stability because it is uneven production. Actually, they increase price stability because the sun and the wind is not owned by anyone after you've done the investment. And if you have it in large scale enough, if you have any energy, common energy market in the Europe with the regulation and the super grid, it's going to balance itself pretty much with this kind of a decent support power solutions. Then actually what we are doing is in politics slightly in the right direction. But what we lack is the semester, the EU budget, putting a total stop on unsustainable investments and subsidies. Well, you know, your member states figures how we are subsidizing the thing that we are trying to get rid of. Actually, it doesn't make any sense, does it? So you wouldn't even need to subsidize what you need to do if you wouldn't sort of try to prevent it by subsidizing the things you shouldn't be doing. And of course, the common agriculture policy is the biggest spook in that area. And then the sustainable finance that is my favorite baby. It's getting the elements and you remember if you do good things, you might be labeled green, that's fine. But the more important is that you shouldn't be labeled insecure or you should be labeled as a risk because that risk is going to double you in stock markets, in lending costs on capital requirements and all that. And no, we do not have, yet we have the first steps in taxonomy and disclosure regulation. Yes, we are going to have the directive on due diligence and disclosure, but the rest is coming and there's a lot of work going on with the ECB and the Finance and Stability Board and everything and that is, and IFRS, it's going to disclose what you are doing. And so if you do bad things, no one is going to put the money in the long run on there. So you better start moving to be a lucrative partner for the future. Thank you. Thank you very much. So you mentioned that a lot of the voices coming from businesses are negative, but of course not all the voices are negative. Kerry, let's turn to you. Tell us a bit about what is the positive message for business in how policy can both help businesses but also help businesses can play their role in this energy transition, particularly with the energy security challenges we face. And in the case of Baal-Berg packaging, specifically how circularity can help that. Yes, hold on. I think we have Sven is maybe trying to come in. No. Yes. Yes. No, no. I just wanted to say bye-bye. Bye-bye. Please now get announced and wish you well and seeing you again in this important theater. Bye-bye. Thank you very much. Okay, so Kerry. It was just getting good. Business was gonna be happy about it. No, Kerry Causey and I lead Baal's aluminum packaging business in Europe. For those of you who don't know who Baal is, which is probably many of you, let me share a little bit. We're a 142 year old company. We have about 14 billion a year in turnover. We're the largest aluminum can manufacturer in the world. And just to give you some scale, we make 400 million cans per day globally. We actually have two plants in Spain. I just wanted to make sure you know. Anyway, so a little bit about Baal. We, of that 14 billion in turnover, around 85% of that is packaging. So the aluminum can business. And the other 15% is an aerospace business. You know, for us, sustainability isn't something we have to do. It's who we are and we'll talk about why in just a second. But we committed to science-based targets back in 2020, aligned with the Paris agreement. And at that point, we said we would reduce our greenhouse gas emissions by 55% scope one and two. So what we can control by 2030. We've also committed to 100% renewable energy. And we've done that in a number of ways. The first is we have two VPPAs, so virtual power purchasing agreements, one in Sweden, one in Spain. The other way is for the balance, we purchase credits. And we're currently evaluating onsite generation as well. We operate in a number of countries. And as you know, that can be a bit complicated depending on where you are and the regulations that you're living with. By the end of this year, we'll have announced our zero, our net zero targets for carbon and greenhouse gas. And this is where I wanna switch from talking about the company that I work for to the thing that we make that's a bit the star of the show. And it's that aluminum can that you drink your favorite beer or soda or beverage from every day. We kind of take it for granted. They're a bit ubiquitous, they're everywhere. But for that, in order to be able to hit that net zero target, we have to get recycling right. Circularity is something that we haven't been talking a ton about here today, but it sits at the center of what we're trying to accomplish. Because without that, we're not gonna get to that net zero place. So today you go home, you drink your can, you put it into recycling container wherever you happen to live. 60 days later, if recycled, it's back on shelf. There was no yield loss because it's a perfect material for recycling. And the thing is, the reason this is so important, is if that aluminum can is recycled, it takes 95% less energy than if it's using virgin material. So again, 95% less. I don't know how to get numbers and statistics to work any better than that. If you remember nothing else when you leave here today or remember that. And so today in Europe, 76% of aluminum cans are recycled. Which isn't bad, it's actually the best of all the beverage packaging. So not bad. But that means there's 24% still out there getting wasted. This is valuable stuff. You can sell it on the market. It carries on for all eternity. And 60 days later it can be another can instead of living in landfill. So for us, that piece around recycling and circularity drives not only economics, but ultimately it's gonna drive demand. Because when something works like a flywheel and has that kind of momentum and can carry on and on and on, eventually it wins. And eventually our customers and consumers understand that. But we need help. And we need a little bit of policy help, honestly. Because where things start to get a little bit strange in Europe is when we have policies that are different in each country rather than one level standard with some minimums. And again, this is a business asking for that. I'm not saying stay away. I'm saying please just a little bit of structure just to make sure we all land in the same place. We need that minimum recycling target of 90% of whatever that substrate is to be recycled. And we need deposit return schemes that make sense. And again, have some minimum thresholds for them. And so anyway, that's a little bit about who we are and what policy help we need to bring circularity to life. Because really, we welcome it. We're not saying stay away. We're saying yes. And how can we do this? Let's turn to another business voice, Julie. So you got a little plug there from Secretary Gugold. Velux manufacturers, roof windows, skylights, sun tunnels that can kind of increase the efficiency of housing. Tell us a little bit about how EU and national energy efficiency measures are making a difference in what you can do as a company. First of all, thank you very much for inviting me here. I think we've all said it's super timely. It's on the background of a difficult context. So I'm gonna talk about opportunity and solutions. Because I think as we heard this morning as well, we do have an opportunity now to move ahead quickly and we're doing that. But in our speed, it's also important that we do the right things. And that's where we, as Velux, have a lot to say. So I think, Mrs. Pettakine, you mentioned that buildings are responsible for 40% of the overall energy use. And that is a good figure. But what's an even better figure is that the IA, says that energy efficiency, can deliver more than 40% of the overall targets we need to meet to reach the Paris climate deal. And most of that is in industry and in buildings. And that's also why the building sector is so important for us. So I'd like to talk a little bit about what we do in terms of our products, which fall into the construction sector, but also what we do as a company. And so I think on the product side, again, today we've talked a lot about renewables. We've talked a little bit about energy efficiency, but I'd like to talk about energy efficiency first, because at the end of the day, if we first achieve what we can with energy efficiency, then we've got less to cover with renewables. So both are really important, but we need to start from the energy efficiency perspective, and then whatever's left, we need to cover with renewables. And then the other thing, and again, we've talked about it, is that we are also an industry that want ambition. And we just know from experience that ambitious and binding targets with a specific measures work, because they force action and they set direction. And that's good on a policy level, but also good on a business level, because we want to know where we're going so we can come along accordingly. So, I mean, that's also our message today. I mean, yes, we're in a very tough situation, also as manufacturers, pricing energy prices, sometimes some resource issues in terms of sourcing the right material, but now is still the time to make sure that we set up a framework that will guide us in the future. And if I can give a very specific example of a directive that's being negotiated right now, it's the energy performance of buildings directive. And one of the things we really want there is we want the specificities, we want the MEPs, so the minimum energy performance standards, because we want to have a clear direction, we want to know where we're going. And again, coming back to your renovation figures, which are way too low in Europe at the moment, they're less than 1%, we need to be 2.5%, but what's way worse than that is that out of 1%, it's actually only 0.12 that our energy efficient renovations, the rest is people getting new kitchens, people upgrading the decor, but not necessarily capturing the potential. So it's super important that we get the renovation up and running, but also that we do these renovations that we do them properly. Now by properly, we also don't just mean from an energy efficient perspective and from a CO2 perspective, but really sort of taking aboard all the multiple benefits of investing in renovation. We heard it before, where companies that produce essentially or we support fresh air and ventilation, right? So one of the things that's really important for us is a focus on health and wellbeing. Now that might sound like a luxury in these times, but health and wellbeing also means your kids perform better at school, you're more productive at work, you're less ill. And quite about not being things that I think we will strive for, there's also a huge financial benefit to making sure that we capture these benefits. So as we're looking at improving the directive, as we're looking to set rules and regulations around how to renovate, it's super important that we capture the whole field of possible benefits. And if I can just say a couple of things about what we're doing as VLUX as well, because these are our products and then there's others as a company, just like Ball, we also have an ambitious plan in place for taking terms of what we're doing. I think one thing I just want to highlight here that we haven't talked so much about is the real value of the partnership. You mentioned your scope one and two emissions as well. At VLUX, our scope one and two emissions are responsible for 6% of our overall footprint. That means that our scope three emissions are 94%. Now for us to be carbon neutral, therefore we are absolutely dependent on working with others. That's why we work with our suppliers and we just made a new agreement with North Kutlo, for instance, in terms of delivering aluminum with a lower footprint. And it's also why it's super important for us to be in a forum like here today. Because I think that just illustrates that there is no way we can do this alone. We're so dependent on all of us working and pulling together. And one more example, because we're talking to national partners here as well. In Denmark where VLUX is headquartered, we set up a couple of years or rather the government set up 14 climate partnerships. The idea of those was to say, right people, right business people, we've set an ambitious target for Denmark. We need to deliver a 70% CO2 reduction. How can we best go about that? And they set up these 14 partnerships where companies worked directly to basically say, what have we got to put forward here? How can we put forward solutions for Denmark to meet this target? VLUX was part of one of these groups. All together, a set of recommendations came out. But I think, again, it's a powerful example of how you can work together between different sort of stakeholders at national level, at European level, to really deliver something that's not just talk. Because talk is good, but what we need the everyday is action. Thanks, Lat. So we've had some great questions coming in from the audience watching online. Before I go to questions from the audience here and online, I just want to turn to Esther first from WWF. So what's your reaction to what we've heard so far in terms of how we keep the EU on track for its climate goals, even in these perilous times? Hello. Thanks, Dave, and thanks to all the speakers. I think I have a great, very privileged role to comment on what the speaker said. And I think we've heard loud and clear that we are not to backtrack on the current climate commitments. I think it's really good to hear that. I think it's also very good, so I'm very just trying to hear that it's really our dependency on fossil fuels which is landing us on the worst energy crisis that we've seen in a generation. I was born in 73, you know, when we had to also stop cars because of the oil crisis and hearing them again, seeing the same, but also is really deepening the social injustice crisis that has been in Europe going on for too long. But I think many have mentioned also the cost of inaction and don't forget that this is a progressive group of voices from legislator to businesses to NGOs, but there are many, many forces out there that they really want to delay this transition. A comment on the short term versus the longer term. Clearly we need now short term, almost emergency measures to help citizens but also SMEs to pay their energy bills. While at the same time, and many speakers mentioned that, we need to continue massively invest on energy efficiency because this is the only way to get out of the fossil fuel dependency which is not good for the planet, but it's not good for our health and it's not good for our bills either. So on the longer term, what we need is really to decarbonize our societies and our economies in a way that is socially just and doesn't increase the inequalities. And all the speakers mentioned a massive deployment of renewables energy, especially wind and solar. And I think it's great to hear from Germany and Spain as a front runners, but that has been done in a way that minimizes the impacts on biodiversity but also involves local populations in the design of those renewable projects. Again, energy efficiency has been mentioned and I think that's also quite key. And other speakers mentioned, for instance, the European Traded Scheme, the ETS, but also having a truly transformative European social climate fund. Many mentioned, I like what you say, Kerry, about we need policy help because it's true that even if we welcome very much and WWF works with a science based targets initiative and others, we see the financial sector, many parts of industry moving into the right direction. We know that these voluntary commitments are not enough. So my message here is that the EU legislation is not the problem, it's actually part of the solution. So now watering down, for instance, requirements when it comes environmental protection in the deployment of renewables, I think that can increase the resistance of the local community to those projects and can backfire. You've mentioned rich chemicals but could be in many other areas. So EU legislation is really part of the response and even if we NGOs can criticize, we have to acknowledge that the influence of legislation that we've seen over the past year is unprecedented. Silpa, you said, listen to the science. I wish we could listen to the science but I think, unfortunately, we've observed few examples in the last months about how we tend to ignore this science or evidence-based policy. You also mentioned the money and that's really important because here we are talking not just a public money but also the private investments that are needed to accelerate the transition. And here I'm afraid we kind of missed a bit of an opportunity with the latest delegated tax on the taxonomy and I would like to thank you personally for your support but this is what we also need, a clear and a credible guidebook for the financial sector to continue moving into this transition and we would need maybe a classification of what is sustainable, transitional, and what is harmful and should be completely give up. Two more points. Secretary of State Geagle has talked about future technologies and I think we all would like to see and have faith in the human ability to come up with a miraculous technology that is going to reduce and absorb all the CO2 from the atmosphere but actually we have existing technologies to do that and these are our ecosystems in Europe. Forests, wetlands, peatlands, gratslands keep and store vast amounts of CO2 and this is what we need to consider more the role of nature in the climate mitigation and adaptation and looking at initiatives like the EU Restoration Law. A last comment. Something that we've learned from the multiple crises that we've been living since the financial crisis in 2008, COVID and now the war is that we definitely need to shift how we measure success in our societies and I think you've, Julia, I think you mentioned that the need to value much more the well-being of our citizens but also to respect much more planet boundaries as well. So this idea of not just measuring purely the GDP and the growth but really measure much more a well-being economy I think it's something that it deserves also attention. Thank you very much. Thanks a lot. You mentioned the unprecedented speed that we've seen with legislation. It's true I've been here a long time and I have never seen EU legislation move as fast as it has over the past six months, especially in the council and it shows I think what national governments are able to do when there's a sense of urgency and we haven't necessarily seen that sense of urgency up until now when it comes to the climate crisis but the question is how do we tap into the current urgency that's being felt in national capitals also for climate at the same time as energy security right now. Let me check with people here in the audience if we have any questions from here in the room. Does anyone have a question for the panelists? We have one here. I think we may have a microphone for you. Not, yes it's coming now. So it's this gentleman right here. Thank you so much. You say your name and where you're from as well. Dr. Stanislav Schmelev, Environment Europe Foundation. Really, really a wonderful set of speakers and very thoughtful comments about the processes that we're discussing. I would like to focus on two reasonably serious things. One is how much are we involved in the evidence-based post-factum assessment of policies that worked or didn't work in different countries in Europe. An example, we've just published a study of the carbon tax in Sweden which empirically, econometrically assessed which were the components and that's including nuclear and hydro and the energy taxes that Sweden introduced before anybody was talking about climate since 1957, et cetera and the 1990s carbon taxes. So is there like a culture of doing this ex post and I mean really the waste legislation, the ETS, a whole bunch of things, right? The carbon trading system and so on. And the second question is about the subsidies and Madam Peter can refer to this kind of in a subtle way. We really do support the fossil fuel industries in a scale of 100 billion and we support nature under 10 billion, shall we say, in a very generous way. Are there any signs that it's going to be reversing anytime soon? And what are the steps you think that are required to put nature at the forefront? Thank you. So I think the first question is a good one to put to Ambassador Fuentes Milani, particularly because I think the Spanish example is something that's very much in a live discussion right now with some of the energy measures being discussed. How well is the EU doing in assessing what has been done at national level? What can then be transferred to EU level and looking at various climate and energy policies? What's worked? What's not worked? Thank you for the question. Well, I think obviously the difference from moving from the national side to the EU side is that it's amazing the diversity and how energy issues in particular affect very directly to citizens. So I mean, trying to put together the different volunteers of, we'll say, feelings of the 27 member states is really challenging. And in doing this, I believe that the institutions have been working rather well, but there is still some space to move. So if we look slightly back, we see, I mean, just in September, two extraordinary energy councils. Behind us, we had agreed on the stock regulation, setting a level of stocks among member states, which was already very difficult because different member states have different capacities to have stock. We are very little affected by the Russian, directly by the Russian supply of gas. On the other hand, we receive a lot through LNG. And the Poles are in the opposite situation or Hungarians even in a more extreme situation because they cannot receive any LNG because they are landlocked countries. So, okay, we agreed to a level of stocks more than I believe it was 80% and at the moment we are beyond that. That was an important step. Then we had on the last energy council on the 30th of September, another important regulation on gas, on reducing gas demand and so on. Okay, this is moving quickly, but on the other hand, what is it that we have in front of us? And this is where in some way, we are hoping the European Commission will react swiftly. And this is the whole discussion at the moment is this one, okay? What is it that we need to do now? And then we have number one, the price gap for gas. Is it going to be a price gap for wholesale gas? Is it going to be a price gap for some sorts of gas such as gas for production of electricity or is it going to have a geographical origin such a price gap for Russian gas? This is one big set of discussions. And member states, of course, have very different views about it. Second, a big discussion. The platforms, I mean, yes, we feel that we need to have a joint system to purchase gas in order to bring down the prices, but then again, we need a proposal from the commission on this thing that is going to create some, I mean, it is also complicated. We need to create an entity which will buy the gas and then distribute it above member states, which is going to be tricky. Second, a very big set of problems. And then, of course, we have the interconnections. I need not speak a lot about it, but obviously if we have an integrated market, things are better really for the energy. Finally, the decoupling of the prices. I mean, the reform of the energy market and the electricity market. This also we feel it is a need that it needs to be tackled as soon as possible, but so many things on the table, different views from the council, but at the end of the day, here in Brussels, we work on the basis of a proposal from the commission and this is what we are hoping to see soon. We'll see if we get that soon. Second question, I believe was to Serpa inside this question of subsidies. Do you see the subsidy situation changing? Well, as soon as this energy market emerges, I think that it helps the situation because now member states are in a way competing with each other with the affordable energy and then this kind of a vested in interest in negotiations. So that might help. And then we are anyway now on the process of renewing this semester because the stability and growth back is unsustainable on day demand. So it's just the empty paper. And that might be the situation where we can push it there, but it's going to be tight, very, very, very tight. And as you refer to the scale, yes, indeed globally, we are using more money to subsidize fossil fuels than we are using for social affairs and health. And this is just outrageous. And I guess you should put it in the global agenda to have this as risky investments and then sort of try to curb it down all in all. Then about, you asked about the biodiversity. This is going to be a hellish debate, as you know, but it's going to be far more hellish future if we do not act now. And I think that it is not so much a problem to deliver the message, but to find enough courageous businesses, scientists, and politicians to open their mouth and say, look, this is an urgency. This is not something we can come back after 10 years because probably there isn't anything what you can come back on those days. And yes, the 30% of ecosystem-friendly areas is a minimum. Yes, it might sound a lot, but figure out how to do it. You don't want to die, basically. And then the next step is, of course, the new elements, how you can, I'd be sort of fantasizing about this kind of a biodiversity, climate nexus where these funds, the compensation funds could be used for biodiversity because anyway sooner or later the biodiversity and this kind of a restored environments are going to be both sinks and storages for the coal also. So someone just would need to figure out what is the mathematics to do that. And yes, we would need to increase at least 10% of the covered area that is now used by human beings to be left back to the nature. They are huge targets, but they are even more important than the climate. And how do we put that message to be serious and not this kind of a lukewarm pandas? The WWF just wants to save and we all want to hug because that this is still, as you know, a bit of the attitude and not that this is the game changer to the better or worse. Or good, better, good. Do we have another question from the audience here in the room? Yes, we have a new microphone, I think, coming to you. Yes. Thank you very much. Grégoire Poisson from Denton Global Advisors. Context is everything. That's what the title of the event. I'd like to come back to the global context. We talked about China in terms of, you know, narrative. We haven't talked about the US. And the fact is that Russian gas has been replaced by US LNG in the context of COP 27. What has been done to connect with the US counterparts to make sure they move in the same direction? Because if not, then there will be a challenge. Alignment is needed here at EU level, but we need to look at the global scale as well. Thank you. And you've been moving in the same direction in terms of climate? In terms of climate objectives, indeed, yeah. Who'd like to take that? Any volunteers there? Well, this is a good question. And actually, but this is just my experience, maybe from the Council of Europe, different experience that actually it is easier to discuss with the Chinese and they have both the reality what needs to happen. Plus, they see it as a much more than we in Europe, pure economic possibility to sell the electric cars, solar panels, whatever, in the long run. Then about the USA, I'm the President of the Global EU and we have tight contacts with the Senate and the Congress with very sort of a limiting crowd of the members. And we try to communicate that and there's a lot of political will there. But you know, the American political system, you never know what comes out and what kind of deals the Senate sort of figures out or the Congress or the cabinet of the President ends up. So it is going more and more short term or reason. Of course, there's a lot of will as I understand in the Biden administration, but can they deliver? I hope that they could deliver more. And then again, it is the big question who is going to continue after this presidential term. Actually, that was a no answer, but I guess we really don't know. Do you want to continue? Yes, thank you. I really share you with you fully on both elements. On the US, I mean, we have a very similar agenda. Let's admit it. I mean, we speak the same language, we see the same problems, but of course we have a political mechanisms with differ a lot from the European Union and the US and the US has their special challenges. So on this, I agree completely. At the moment, I think we are in a good position to move forward and we will move as partners and as allies and well, we do not need to see everything exactly the same way, but obviously the parameters are there. We agree on the landscape and the direction of trouble. With China, it's another story. Obviously, I think there has been a little bit of eye-opening in the last years. We see China more than as a challenge in some aspect and a strategic rival as they say in the external action service. And yes, we have a lot to learn on how to deal with China. We feel that we need to make progress about that. Do we have another question from the floor? Yes, over here. Thank you very much, Duli Kaskinen from Climate Leadership Coalition, Finland, Sweden, Denmark. We have been talking about emissions and that's of course the key, but then there is the other side which is sinks and sequestration and we all know that in ability to go like IPCC said below the targets to be able to stay in 1.5 degrees, it means that we need sinks and technical solutions as well. Should we talk about more of those and how do you see what would be the way for this community to bring those topics further in EU? To take that, sequestration. Sir, but you want to start us off again? Yeah, go for it. Abhi, you don't have a mic. As I said in my wrap up, of course, I think we can invest in some technologies but I think what is key now is that we stop emitting because otherwise it creates a narrative and that's now some of the climate delayers, no denials because now the science is so clear and the events in Europe have been so clear that no one can deny that it's here. But we are seeing more and more this delay and it's like, wow, 2030, we can continue emitting and then we'll have some carbon capture storage or no, we need to drastically cut emissions now. And then as I said, I'm not an specialist on technologies but my organization is a specialist in ecosystems and without having all the full data, if you restore what we call the degraded habitats in the birds and habitats directive, you can absorb, I think is the amount of Spain's CO2 emission in a year, 300 tons and we are just talking about terrestrial ecosystems. We don't have data about the marine ecosystems which are not properly protected as well. So I think we need also, and that's what I'm talking about, where we put our investments as well. We know that ecosystems can certainly help us on the climate and visual, so let's invest on that as well. So, I don't know. Sirpa, go ahead. Well, there are two scales, if we look it in the global scale, I just would love to see the situation that we can stop the diminishing storages and the sinks, you all know what happens in Brazil and then partly in Russia and so on. Then, good that you started with the scale, the issue is that we can't not even technically to reforest or revild that big amounts that could actually take up the needs of decreasing. And what that means is that we should actually say it loud and clear what we does not, that this is not a compensation. So it's not either either, it is plus. And then if you go there, it is emissions plus, higher reductions. And when we are talking about the 70% being the right scale for 2030, not the 57. So you need to do that plus then reserve a huge amount of efforts on stopping the decrease of the sinks, to increase saturation, to increase sinks, to increase storage, to clean up there because we are in a mess already and we would need to actually decrease the amount of carbon in there. And this should be sort of the order. And by the way, yes, we should start doing it now and not by 2030. And it is the same with CL, the carbon capture and reuse or the storage that it is plus. It is not a possibility to continue emitting or using fossils. Yeah, I think on that note, we have a related question that certainly to Esther's point that's coming from the online audience. This question is from Doreen Federigo. Numerous studies have shown that efficiency alone won't reduce absolutely our resource and energy use in greenhouse gas emissions. We actually need sufficiency, reduction targets. The eco design regulation can provide the legislative framework for a sufficiency approach. Does the panel support this idea of pushing for reduction and also through demand-decide reduction? I think this is a good question for our two business representatives here. Kerry, what do you think about this question of should we be focusing more on demand-side reduction than some of these ideas like sequestration or also diversification? Are we missing that element here? Yeah, I think, well, first of all, efficiency probably won't get us all the way there, but we do know how to do it. And so we shouldn't stop doing that. It's much like the end. So number one on that, we do know how to do that. For us, you can talk about demand-side, but if you're actually doing something that's circular, you shouldn't have to deprive the consumer of what it is they want. You're actually finding a way for the consumer to have what they want, when they want it, in a convenient way, and not doing anything that's detrimental to the environment. So, yes, for certain products, that may be the case, but I think if you're able to truly have a circular and science-based, by the way, by the science, not the story, but if you're able to be circular, then you shouldn't have to reduce that demand. Julie, what do you think? Do we need to be focusing more on demand-side reduction? I mean, I think that's pretty much what I said in my remarks, right, that we need to have a focus on energy efficiency in reducing the overall need first before we then look at how to cover the remaining needs, so absolutely. I mean, I think there is a discussion, and we've talked about it sort of indirectly here today as well. We are currently in a situation where we're using way beyond what's been allocated to our part of the world in terms of CO2, in terms of energy, and there needs to be a reduction in that. Of course, circularity is a really important aspect. We're also working on that. We're working to reduce the overall footprint of our products, too, because we're not gonna go back to living in caves, but we do need to find a world that better matches the resources we have available. I'm gonna take one more question from the online audience before we wrap up the panel. This question comes from Andre Voichu. Could you please convey the question to the panelists? What is the role of sustainability disclosure in ensuring climate change targets are met? What needs to be improved in ensuring the alignment of disclosure and the concrete actions undertaken by companies? Who would like to take that question on disclosure? Esther, do you wanna take it, maybe? We work on that, but I have to say it's not the area where most of the specialists, but indeed, and I think, Sirpa, you maybe can comment on the directive that is being negotiated, but yes, clearly we need, when we talk, for instance, about the financial sector moving, it's not just the investment. We also need the disclosure part. So, you know, the climate plans, the director's obligations as well, but I have to say, unfortunately, I'm not the expert in my team. We do work on that, but I think Sirpa might have a much more informed comment on that or maybe Carrie as well, and Julie in terms of, because it does create more obligations for companies, you know, to prepare the climate plans and tell how they are going to become climate. Yes, Sirpa, if you could tell us about, first about just about the legislative developments and then Carrie can respond to that. If you can continue, I can go after you. Okay, Carrie, go ahead. I'm getting conflicting signals here. No, that is true. It does take more work to do that, but we're also a publicly traded company and we want people to believe in who we are and what we do and that we do it in the right way. And if those disclosures allow us to give people comfort that we are and that we do, then they're a good thing. And we have to see it that way and embrace it that way. One of the reporters of the CSDD directive, so I hopefully know something about it. For your sake, I hopefully know something about it. And there are a couple of principles. Firstly, reflect the financial regulation. It has a pretty good standard. So what you say needs to be audited because it needs to be true. The directors duties should be involved. So the CEO and the board should be responsible. So it isn't the final sector too. The know for an answer is not an answer. I didn't know, I didn't know how to know. It's not in the financial sector either. It's your duty to be aware and find the ways how to be aware and if you can't, don't use those suppliers or don't use those kind of people working for you or materials that matter. And then again, it needs to be, and this most important need needs to be harmonized comparable because otherwise you already have quite a number of reporting but if you can't figure out what's the difference between these and these companies, it really doesn't help you. Longer on this, of course, needs to be linked with the taxonomy. It needs to be linked with these closer financial actors. So invest only on those companies that have the due diligence on place. And then of course it has the ESG, the good governance and the other sectors that you know very well. It needs to be linked in the long run with the IFRS reporting scheme so that you don't cause companies millions of different reporting schemes. And what is important again, it shows the positive side but it shows the bad side too. And this goes to the transition. You could be whatever action or shell or whatever, if you have a plan, how you change your business concept, if you have a transition plan, if it is audited and your actions are audited, if you are transforming your activity, you could be this kind of a transformative in quotes candidate company. And then after a couple of years, like five years, if you achieve what the target is, what you promised them that are ambitious enough, then you could sort of return a full fledged green company. And something like this, I think that we would need, but the commission is reluctant to move at least during this election period to make any proposals on this end. So if that is of your interest, please do kick them on the Digi, and make them to move a bit. Indeed, comparability is the big question when it comes to disclosure. And that's what the EU legislation is supposed to be solving. Well, I wanna thank all of our panelists for some excellent insights. How about a round of applause for them? So we're now going to move on to a 15 minute coffee break that you can find right outside here. Be back here in the room at 2.45 where we'll have our next panel, Building Blocks for a Global Energy Transition and Accelerated Climate Action. See you back here soon. Okay, welcome back everyone. We're going to go ahead and get started. So we're moving on now to session two, which is on Building Blocks for a Global Energy Transition and Accelerated Climate Action. So this session is going to look at some of the drivers to accelerate the energy and climate transition globally in the run-up to COP 27 in Egypt and particularly the role that the EU and businesses in the EU are playing in that transition and particularly to enable that transition. So let me introduce the panelists we have with us here in the room. We have Elina Bardrum, Director for Adaptation and Resilience, Communication and Civil Society Relations at the European Commission's Director General for Climate Action. We have MEP Per Holmgren, Member of the Environment Committee in the European Parliament, who is in the Greens Group. We have Anthony Abbott, Director for Group Public Affairs and Sustainability at the Rockwell Group. Rockwell is a multinational manufacturer of mineral wool products. And we have Sophie Puntem, Managing Director of Policy for the We Mean Business Coalition. Then joining us remotely online, we have Terry Latonin, State Secretary for the Ministry of the Environment and Climate Change in Finland. And we have Leela Karbasi, Senior Officer for UN Global Compact and Chair of the Executive Board of the Science-Based Targets Initiative. Welcome to all of you. Thanks so much for joining us. We're going to start with Leela. Leela, you're following all of these international climate negotiations very closely. Tell us a bit about your takeaways from New York Climate Week and what your expectations are for the upcoming COP 27 Summit in Charnelschijk. Thank you so much for having me and good afternoon, everyone. I'm joining from New York. Sorry that I couldn't be with you at the event, but it's great to be part of it anyways. So I'm going to start with a few priorities for the COP 27 in Egypt and lots of headlines and sort of summaries of what's ahead of us in the media. I think I'll just share five main priorities at the moment, looking at the COP. First of all, this is, again, a COP that's taking place against a backdrop of many global crises, which makes everything more difficult for the negotiations. There is a big expectation that the topic of loss and damage will be dominating the discussions and the negotiations at COP, building on previous discussion, a big focus on adaptation. This is a COP for Africa, focusing also on the most vulnerable countries. Still a big priority to strengthen emission reductions targets and the NDCs. We have a request to enhance them every year. This is also a COP that will look at the global stocktake that will conclude in 2023 at COP 28 in the UAE. So the preparations are going to continue with that following up on what happened in Glasgow. And then finally, this is also a COP to look at beyond pledges, from pledges to action and are the pledges on track to be realized we're expecting the expert group of the Secretary General on the credibility of pledges, net zero targets to have a report on that to understand what the framework is for credible corporate action on net zero. I think we'll get a big turnout from business. There was already a record number of companies going to Glasgow, but the indications show that there will be probably as many, if not more companies showing up at this COP. So talking about pledges and the credibility of pledges, I just wanna highlight a few key achievements from the Science Based Target Initiative and announcements that were made at the climate week and during UN week, just a few weeks ago. First of all, there's big momentum around the SBTI. Today, there's one third of the global economy that has pledged towards SBTI and that's 3,800 companies. About 50% are in Europe. Europe is really well represented. 20% in Asia, 80% in North America. We need to make this a global effort. We need to bring the developing markets, emerging economies into the pipeline as well and make all efforts in particular to reduce the upfront investment in renewable in developing countries. The request for regulation is still there. That was also one of the main highlights from the climate week, asking for clarity, stability in terms of legislation. And again, Europe is really well positioned with the directive and a number of legislation in the making. And this is really under the premise that if businesses are not in line with the 1.5 temperature goal, this is really material risk for financial performance and for the future stability of markets. So there's a strong case to be made for a level playing field for regulation on not only on disclosure of CO2, but also on performance and how companies compare with the 1.5 temperature goal. I also wanna mention quickly two big priorities for the SBTI. One is to enhance transparency, accountability of progress against the targets and we have launched a stream of work called measurement reporting and verification. And we plan to talk about this for the COP in thermal check, but also finalize this project by the next one. So this is a big priority for the initiative. And in the meantime, we have companies obviously report on their targets and their achievements and progress reports being published annually, giving all the data in terms of company performance. The second big thematic priority on the SBTI side is on beyond value chain mitigation. So all of the mitigation that is happening within the value chain counts towards the purposes of decarbonization, but we also recognize that there's a big role in investments in looking at investments beyond anything that has to do with the value chain of businesses. And that's a huge source of capital, particularly for developing countries, it's investments in nature, investments in renewable, it helps accelerate the movement towards net zero. So again, another stream of work, very important and this is also building on some outcomes of the UN week and climate week on understanding the role of the carbon markets, carbon credits and which incentives are given for companies to invest on those. So I'm gonna stop here. I know you asked for five minutes and I'm happy to stay around if there are questions or comments, thank you again for having me. Thanks very much, Lila and Lila will be still with us when we do that the Q and A toward the end of the panel. Let's turn to our next online panelist, which is Terry Latonin, state secretary for the Ministry of Environment and Climate Change in Finland. Secretary Latonin, tell us what is Finland's perspective on the green transition and how it relates to the energy crisis, particularly ahead of the COP 27 summit. Good afternoon and thank you, Dave and thank you for the invitation and also congratulations for a very timely theme for the summit with the negotiations for the fit for 55 package at the last stretch and COP 27 just less than a month away. Friends and colleagues, the Russian attack on Ukraine has brought energy security on the top agenda. The problems are immediate and need fast responses but we must keep an eye on the long-term as investments in the energy sector are long-lived. In the short term in Europe, due to the halting of Russian supplies, energy markets may need to resort to even increasing coal use to ensure security of peak supply but this should not affect our policy framework towards 2030. And I'm very pleased with the Council on European Parliament decisions in this rect on the repower EU finance, avoiding releasing extra allowances from the ETS market stability reserve. And this goes also to show you that climate has not been put on the back burner in the EU, something that Dave your questions in your opening remarks. The real solution is simply to break away from the use of fossil energy as quickly as possible. This will also bring tangible co-benefits, improved air quality and big savings on imported fossil fuels. And it is crunch time for walking the talk in respect of leaving no one behind. For example, in Finland, we are not giving up on our targets, which is now binding in law to be climate neutral by 2035 and carbon negative soon after that. But we have altered back loaded, if you like, the trajectory for achieving 34% renewable fuels in our transport sector by 2030. We continue to favor zero emission vehicles that purchase and in respect of annual vehicle taxes, we subsidize charging infrastructure and we have increased support to public transportation. We stick to our targets to half transport sector emissions by 2030 and put them to history by 2045. The government has increased support for buildings and households to move away from oil and gas heating and energy renovations in general. The decision to dedicate at least half of the RRF recovery funding to direct climate action bears fruit now. We have also increased human resources and given priority for green transition investments in environment and land use planning permitting and in administrative courts in respect of judicial review processes. To deal with the skyrocketing electricity prices, the government has increased social support payments and introduced a tax deduction for high electricity costs while maintaining incentives for reducing consumption. To tackle some of the contextual factors examined also in the CLG study, the government is introducing a green transition loan guarantee for households and small businesses. Now, when it comes to global green transition, despite the challenging geopolitical situation already alluded to by Leila, we must not lose sight of the big picture. Climate is reacting to the greenhouse gas concentrations more aggressively than what we thought. The one and a half degree objective is more pertinent than ever, yet the window is closing for even for achieving the temperature directories with overshoot. The COP 27 will be very much an African COP and given the experience impacts and lack of certainty of achieving the temperature goals, the agenda will undoubtedly have a strong focus on adaptation, loss and damage and international climate finance. These are all valid and important topics and we need to make progress on all of them. But at the same time, we cannot lose track on the urgent need for mitigation action, including commitments to update NDCs. Achieving the target of one and a half degrees will be of essence to be able to keep the needs for adaptation and loss and damage more manageable. Last year's COP agreed on the Glasgow climate fact, which includes several commitments to ensure a necessary mitigation action. Unfortunately, progress on implementation is less encouraging. We need all major economies to update their NDCs to be in line with the Paris Agreement and to present robust implementation plans. My fear is that after this year's COP, the goalposts at the global level and UNFGC agenda move from 2030 to looking at 2035 timeframe. And we cannot afford to lose any momentum to the contrary we need to accelerate. One of the new interesting tools for accelerating the transition is the Just Energy Transition Partnerships, the first of which was launched in Glasgow with South Africa. I look forward to hearing from Elina Moore about further progress on that front. As has been discussed in the last panel, the EU must do its part. We are on good track to finalizing an ambitious fit for 55 package, which will guarantee EU delivers at least 55% reduction by 2030. And we should use the energy crisis to achieve it early. We need more installed solar, wind power generation, more heat pumps, more smart energy storage and more flexible energy demand. To the businesses around this table, I would ask, do we have the production lines available to deliver all the panels and heat pumps for Europe? Do we have the entrepreneurs to install and refurbish our homes? Mobilizing finance for the green transition is key for all governments grappling with energy crisis, but finance will also be a central theme at the COP. Delivering our commitments on international finance in general and adaptation finance in particular is a must. NGOs have been calling for a levy on fossil extraction to finance loss and damage and adaptation and judging from the difficulty of meeting the commitments already made long time ago, innovative and independent finance sources should be sought. Still, in the big picture, it is fundamental we get cracking on fully implementing the Paris Agreement commitment to align all financial flows with climate goals. All finance and investment should be consistent with Paris Agreement path. I hope this view is also shared with the business community and we can join forces with business representatives to ensure progress at the COP 27 on this front. Thank you. Thanks very much, Secretary Latonen. It's interesting your notes about the fear of the goalpost being moved from 2030 to 2035. This is something I've been hearing a lot. So I think it's not just you who fears that. Let's move on now to the panelists here in the room. Alina, let's turn to you. Tell me about the commission's approach and expectations when it comes to COP 27, when it comes to these fears that we may see targets being walked back. And then also the upcoming Paris stock take that's scheduled for 2023. Important moments in time. I guess it's easier to hear me now with the microphone. So it's nice to come in after Laila has given her perspective from the New York Climate Week and Derhi has spoken a little bit from the member states perspective but also from the perspective of kind of the union in terms of where our ambitions and objectives, expectations lay vis-à-vis this COP. I would start by saying that this COP, COP 27, is not supposed to deliver very much in terms of negotiated agenda items. What we have since Katowice is a rulebook that's been by and large agreed. We have the contours of the international climate regime, including the ratcheting mechanism every five years for revisiting the ambition in terms of the nationally determined contributions. And we have a regime that's including all countries. So all countries need to put their best leg forward in terms of doing whatever possible to contain and maintain that the temperature objectives limits within reach. So we have a universal agreement that's requiring implementation. And that's where I would put the accent for COP 27. It really has to be about implementation showing that governments are walking the talk but also showing that the whole of the economy is doing this. That the governments and citizen and businesses alike are ready to embrace the green transition agenda. And surely, like has been said before, the predominant global narratives such as the war in Ukraine, such as the inflation that we see in a runaway course such as the food crisis provide an extremely complicated backdrop to the conversations that are supposed to take place in Charmel Shake. So in light of all of this, I think it's very important for all practitioners and all of us who are engaged in climate action to maintain the course, to somehow resist that the kind of emerging narrative that tries to pitch north and the south against each other because the crisis is a common and a shared one and we all must work hand in hand to resolve it. Our expectations, of course, are very similar to those that have been outlined by Laila and Derhi. We want to see all parties deliver on what they agreed to do in the context of Glasgow Climate Pact. Explain, come forward to show how their nationally determined contribution corresponds to the temperature objectives that have been set in the Paris Agreement. Notably staying within two degrees and pursuing efforts to maintain the temperature increase within 1.5 degrees. So that ministerial discussion is going to be one of the highlights of the COP. In addition to that, we need to see more action, more testimonies, if you like, of the delivery on the solidarity parts of the Paris Agreement. It's no secret that donors collectively fell short of the 100 billion pledge, but it's also no secret that donors are upscaling and really looking to fast forward the accessibility of the climate financing, which is in such dire need across the world. So what we want to tell to our partners at the African COP is that we are ready to work with them, to do more and to do more smarter in order to ensure that the negative consequences of climate change can be dealt with at the locations that most require the assistance. We will be lining up a lot of the activities that we've been undertaking as the commission and team EU to demonstrate how this solidarity aspect of the climate regime maintains and remains a central part, central plank of the overall regime. Laila and Terhi both mentioned the loss and damage question. Indeed, it goes without saying that this is an area that requires due recognition. We have been very sympathetic to the conversations, even including at the SB session in Bonn during the summer. But engaging in this conversation needs to be done in a way that looks at what is the real need of the developing countries and is a fund the only way to go about it or should we try and look for ways to work within the existing systems and structures to maximize the efficiency to make sure that those who need the support can have that without too much bureaucracy. I think it's important to maybe say two words about the role of the businesses in all of this. Businesses and other stakeholders have become increasingly important enablers of the Paris implementation. Without the resource, without the confidence of businesses in the direction of travel, we would not be making the progress we are. Sometimes public administrations and governments are too slow to catch up onto the new trend, what's coming. And I'm glad to see that in many instances, it is the businesses who are demanding more rigorous and more decisive action from the governments. And I think this needs to be part of the DNA of the conversations. In addition, the power of example, the power of showing the art of possible is something that particularly those businesses who have been first movers can bring to the forefront by showcasing good examples. I'll stop there, thanks. Thanks very much, Per. Let's turn to you next. What is your expectations for COP 27 from the perspective of the parliament? If it's not on, you could just switch up the switch, yeah. Yep. It's working, yeah. Thank you very much. I'd like to reflect on your final words at the end, but first, I would like to discuss the whole thing with the background that I have. I'm a climate scientist, climate expert. I've been studying these things since I was a PhD student 30 years ago, especially climate science, but of course also climate politics. And we still have this huge bridge gap between science and politics. So just to start things off with a very brief summary of where we are from a scientific point of view right now. We are at 1.2 degrees already, although we've had three consecutive years at the Pacific Ocean with the La Nina situation, a cooling event. We're still at 1.2 degrees. And we know that the World Meteorological Organization says that it's at least 50% risk that within roughly five years, we will see at least one single year hitting 1.5 degrees. We know that we have a global warming rate of roughly 0.2 degrees, a little bit more than that per decade. And this means that we will reach 1.5 degrees more or less permanently within 10 years from now. We have politicians all around the world, me being one of them then, still discussing about climate neutrality maybe 2050. That means that we will continue for another 30 years to increase the greenhouse effect, which means that we will accelerate the rate of global warming, where above 0.2 degrees now per decade, we will probably reach 0.3 degrees per decade in the 2040s. And all of you then realize that means more or less two degrees in 2050. On top of that, we know that we have a global dimming effect, a cooling effect by aerosols, by dirt, by smog in the air, especially in the south and southeast of Asia. And this smog, this dirt mainly comes from dirty fossil energy and transport. So by making this huge transition that we need to do in the long run, in the short run, we will have additional warming, probably in the order of 0.5 degrees. This means that with the ambitions that we are discussing right now, the ambitions that we discussed in Glasgow, the ambitions that we will discuss in Sharma Sheikh, we will probably reach 2.5 degrees in 30 or 40 years from now. And that could be a more or less inhabitable world. And we're still trying to treat this as some sort of problem that we may be can solve in one way or another. One of the core issues from the Friday Future Movement is that we need to address this as a crisis because it is a crisis. But quite soon, we will be in a position where it isn't crisis anymore because the crisis will be in the past and we will be in the catastrophe. By that said, of course, from a political point of view, now me switching hats and being an MEP, negotiating the COP 27 resolution, of course, the most important thing is to raise the ambitions, to raise the NDCs. They must be much higher than they are today. And of course, with only one month to the COP, it would take a miracle to raise all the NDCs well ahead of the COP 27. But still, that is the single most thing that we need to do because none of the major players, and that is the European Union, China, and the United States, of course, are even close to what is needed to be in line with what science says is needed to be within reach of what we have said in the Paris Agreement. So that is number one, most important, and the other is, of course, something that a lot of the other speakers have addressed as well. The fact that we need now to realize that we're moving into this dangerous zone of loss and damage. I mean, back in the 90s, when the first cops were held, we only needed to discuss mitigation and adaptation because it was still really, really possible to limit the global warming below two degrees in the order of 1.5 degrees. And somewhere in that order, 1.5 to two degrees, then we can discuss adaptation. And adaptation can help most of the countries in the world. But now we're in a situation where we know that just for as one example, the sea levels will rise in between five and 10 meters. We cannot stop that anymore. It could take maybe 500 years or maybe 1,000 years or something, but those processes, when it comes to melting glaciers and warming oceans, have already passed those so-called tipping points. And then we cannot discuss adaptation anymore. I mean, just look what just happened, happening in Pakistan. Of course, I'm from Sweden. We can discuss climate adaptation probably for centuries ahead, but for many, many other parts of the world, we will be beyond adaptation. And then, of course, once again, the European Union and the United States especially must take full responsibility when it comes to financing loss and damage because usually when we discuss mitigation and who's to blame, we often hear that China is the biggest emitter. They must take responsibility. And especially in Glasgow, more and more people started to discuss India and India's future, but future responsibility. But when it comes to the fact that we're now at roughly 420 parts per million carbon dioxide, that is 50% more than pre-industrial levels, that increase is roughly 25% to blame United States and roughly 25% to blame Europe, including Great Britain, Norway and other countries outside of the European Union. So of course, it's mainly European Union and United States that need to really address and take full responsibility, full leadership when we now are entering this new world where we need to address loss and damage. But I would also like to comment with what you said, Elina, because when it comes to companies, businesses, I see a total different dynamics because of course a lot of companies all around the world are starting to realize in this now. And they also realize hopefully then that by being a business leader, by taking full responsibility, you will also create business, you will create jobs and you can make a profit out of the transition. So unfortunately I really feel that in the political world we are still stuck inside this sort of blame game. It's always someone else's fault and no one is really, really stepping up and taking full responsibility. But I really hope that when it comes to businesses, a lot of important leading actors already during the next few years and during this decade will be that important leading role that will show the rest of the world that it is possible to transform the company and help transform the society and make it possible for the single company and the single country, et cetera, to make that transition fully in a sustainable way. Thank you. Thanks, Per. Anthony, let's turn to you next. Tell us about how a company like Rockwell can play a role in the energy transition. This is a tough one because I've heard so many good speakers this morning, also this afternoon. I prepared my intervention and I've changed a number of times because a number of the speakers have come up with so many relevant points. I'm really glad, Pierre, that it was you that talked about the climate crisis and the urgency. I was thinking about doing the same but it's definitely more credible that it's coming from a scientist rather than a business. But when I did hear Leela talk about one of the five priorities at COP being moving from pledge to action, then I felt that we needed to get some science on the table because we should only be talking about action because we're way behind the curve. A little bit about our company. So Rockwell largest stonewall manufacturer in the world, just based outside Denmark. And we've been here for just over 80 years. So not quite as long as Paul. I think it was 140 odd years. But a company where sustainability is incredibly important for us. And I know that that sounds corny because a lot of companies make that claim but we really see it as a business necessity and also a business opportunity. It makes commercial sense for us. And one of the reasons for that is because over 70% of our revenue is coming from stonewall insulation products. And of course insulation as a product has an enormous positive impact on energy efficiency and thereby on climate. When we talk about sustainability, we differentiate between the handprint and the footprint. So the handprint is the positive impact of one's products and the footprint is the negative impacts. And we're working at both ends of the spectrum. But in order for it to work for us, we need conducive regulatory conditions. So we usually say that we're a net negative company and that we're saving 100 times the CO2 that we generate when making the products. And that's because of the energy that we save in the lifetime. Doesn't mean to say that we don't have carbon emissions. We actually have quite a lot of them because we're an energy intensive company. We're melting stone at 1400 degrees. We've signed up to science-based targets. But one of the big challenges we have is that we cannot decarbonize fast enough because the infrastructure is not there. The green electricity, the renewables that we need to change to are not there. Or the grid connections that we need to have in order to electrify our factories that are not there. So there's clearly a challenge, and I think this is a challenge for many businesses, that they're wanting to move fast but the infrastructure is not there. And there's no doubt regulations can help us on that. What I wanted to focus on was on the other end that was on the building side. And what we can do there, we've been talking about buildings and the lost opportunity with buildings for, I think, decades now. What we're seeing is that we're definitely in Europe moving in the right direction from a regulatory point of view. We have the energy efficiency directive. We have the energy performance and buildings directive. We're seeing that the ambition levels are relatively high and we're working hard to make sure that they are high. A comment was made earlier in the panel about energy dependency. Of course, when we talk about renovation of the existing building stock, then we often say win, win, win. You know, it has a positive social impact. It has a positive environmental impact carbon emissions and it has a positive economic impact in terms of job opportunities. If we focus on the energy dependency part first, we did a piece of work with Guide House to try to understand the impact of going deep with renovation compared to going shallow. And what they found out was that if we moved from the worst performing buildings, which is around 30% of the total building stock in Europe, if we moved there to energy class C or even B for some buildings, then we could actually remove fossil fuels from those buildings. That's no fossil fuels in 30% of the building stock. If we went shallow, then we could get rid of 30%. So it just says a little bit about the potential, the opportunity, but the technology is there. The solutions are there. We don't need to find something new. They're sitting on the shelf and they're ready to be used. So there's a big opportunity there. We know there's a lot of political challenges when it comes to energy efficiency and retrofitting. And we understand that there is a concern that some of the building renovation schemes can be ineffective or too costly. One of the great things from the report that was launched today was the good examples that come from Italy in the Superbonus scheme, which is a very egalitarian scheme because it means that you don't have to have the money upfront. You can pass that risk or that cost over to the construction company who can take the cost and then do that piece of work. We're seeing other examples in Bulgaria, Lithuania. There's a lot of good examples out there. It can be done. We just got to share best practice and get it done. When we talk about what is key in order to be successful from a building renovation perspective, we talk about four things. We talk about mandate and there's the legislation. It's a key part. If we don't have the legislation, then we don't have the right framework. The finance needs to be there but it's not just a case of the finance just being there. It needs to be accessible for as many people as possible, not just for the elite, not just for the high-income groups, not just for the academics that can understand what they need to do to fill in a form. We're seeing definitely a move in the right direction in terms of the finance being available. We also need to simplify. We often hear that renewables need to have more streamlined permitting processes. I get that because the lead time for getting these wind turbines in place, that can be relatively long. But it's not just the case for renewables. I mean, if we're talking about a green transition that we're serious about, then we need to be able to make it less bureaucratic for other green solutions to be able to get into the buildings, to be produced, to be manufactured. There was a question earlier, very relevant question from Terry about do we have the production lines and do we have the workforce to actually deliver? And my comment to that or answer to that would be not necessarily we are challenged on both and having predictability, having a clear roadmap for what we want to achieve. That's incredibly important. And then the last point I would like to make is the support, the support mechanisms, the support infrastructure, which again is something that was highlighted extremely well in the report by CLG. In connection with the COP26, we polled 100,000 people, sorry, 10,000 people to find out were they supportive of renovation? 74% of them supported minimum energy performance standards as long as the finance was available, as long as the technical assistance was there, as long as it was easy for them to do it. And we've got to make it easy for them to do it. One of the key elements here is one-stop shops where a consumer goes one place and they get the right advice, they get the money and they understand which business is to contact to get the job done. We've got to make that much easier for them. So I think I'll stop there. I don't know, maybe one last comment. Awareness raising campaigns, that's also incredibly important because we've seen, for example, there's a one-stop shop in Brussels called the Home Grade System. There was a one-stop shop and no one knew about it because there was no awareness raising. Then they started putting it on buses and trains and whatnot and then suddenly people realized, okay, I can go there. So clearly awareness raising, that's also an enabler or a factor that needs to be taken into account. Again, something that was mentioned in the report. Thanks a lot. Sophie, let's turn to you. So the We Mean Business Coalition is working with businesses globally on climate issues. What do you expect will be the role of businesses at COP 27? Yeah, so thank you very much. For those who are not familiar with We Mean Business Coalition, it was founded just before Paris. And the idea of it was if we want a strong Paris agreement, we need to go with one business voice to Paris instead of everybody's voices and we crowd each other out. And so the We Mean Business Coalition was formed with seven partner organizations, including CLG Europe, but for example, also the World Business Council stated the development, the climate group and CDP. Now what we did is we formulated eight policy asks with an exact wording of how it could be included in the Paris agreement and the specificity or the simplicity of what could policy makes actually do with these recommendations was the key to success. Now that's something we're trying to keep following through. So we're now bringing working partners or CLG Europe is obviously focusing on the EU. We also have partners focusing on Germany like Steve from Klima Beach Shop. We have climate work focusing on renewable energy or electric vehicles, et cetera. What we do to COP is we have a business pavilion where we bring organizations and businesses that are pro climates together. So there's one place where that voice is heard, different voices, but they're where we do unite behind key messages. And the message for this year is all in. And all in means that we must go from the ambition to the implementation. So I would like to bring three things we'll be taking to COP. The first one is the importance of ambition. So what we are indeed fearing is that countries will go backwards and thinking, oh, we'll delay the little bit or we'll make a few exemptions. And as a result, the whole ambition or the 2.4 degrees where we're currently at with the existing commitments is Watertown. And for the EU though, I think what will be really key to do is explain to the global audience how the climate deal is EU Green Deal is being translated concretely into the 5th for 55. The more concrete examples of policies we have that work, the more likely other countries are going to pick that up instead of staying at a high level in intent. The second one is about the energy transition. The energy crisis right now is actually the opportunity to accelerate the energy transition. And I see a lot of companies and governments moving in that direction. But let's also be concrete about what success means. If we're going to have emissions by 2030 in order to stay in line with a 1.5 degree scenarios, that means we must have 61 of global electricity being generated from renewable energy. But business is trying to do its bit. There's 380 companies who've joined the RE100 program of the climate group and they together have committed to getting to 100% renewable energy, which is the size of the UK or Italy's demand. So there are businesses trying to do its bit. We also see that where government can now accelerate action is making sure that we have 100% decarbonized power systems by 2035 and that in the EU, we start seeing indeed 45% renewable energy targets, but also getting more ambitious energy efficiency targets fully eliminating fossil fuel subsidies direct and indirect and ending coal-fired power generation in the future. And that also means that despite the emergency measures, the speaker earlier said it, lock in is the biggest danger so as long as we don't go there. The third message I wanted to, the third thing we're gonna take to cope is about industrial decarbonization. And when I talk about industry, I talk broadly speaking all end users of energy, right? So let me take transport for an example. Having emissions by 2030 means 300 million electric vehicles on the road. That's concrete, we can see where, how we need to get there. It means more than 6 million heavy-duty trucks that are electric on the road and we can see how we can get there. But let me take steel with a little bit more detail. If you want to get to half emissions by 2030, you need 70, at least 70 zero emissions steel plants. Now I can see industry people going, whoa, that's a lot, but that's what it would look like. And they together would produce 280 megatons of net zero steel per year. That's concrete, I can get that. And then what businesses are doing is 27 steel buyers have now committed to produce 50% of low-emission steel by 2030 and 100% by 2050 through steel zero. And responsible steel is having an energy transition strategy for this sector in place that many companies committed to as well. And finally, and then what governments can now do is they can accelerate the demand for steel. Did you know that the purchasing power of many governments is almost 20% in many countries? If governments were to commit that they're gonna buy net zero steel, net zero and a million, et cetera, et cetera, they would immediately change the picture for society. And so business can do its bit, the governments must do the same. My final point is about the EU and EU role, and that's more like a request for the policy makers who are here in the room. I'm European and I'm seeing the change in power in the world and we've seen China becoming bigger and the US having its own struggles, but Europe is almost squashed in the middle. Don't forget our secret weapon. And our secret weapon is we set the standards. We've seen it with the privacy laws. We've seen it with food and safety. We've seen it with Euro standards for fuels. I used to work in transport and air pollution all across Asia. They've got Euro one, two, three, four, five. They call it different, it is our standard, right? So let's take this opportunity that to also make this happen for climate. Countries are looking what's happening with CBAM. What happened is the emission trading scheme. Yeah, what's happening with the corporate sustainable reporting directive, which is way more ambitious than anything being proposed anywhere in the world. Now, two examples that I want to particularly point out. One is where I think it's turning out well and the other one not so well. The first one where it's turning out well is the regulation of tackle deforestation and forest degradation. That one is very ambitious and I'm aware that the US is looking at the EU proposed law to influence their forest act. So here you see a direct positive influence. The example that I don't think is going that well is the EU taxonomy. For all it's worth, I think putting gas in there has created a confusing message to the rest of the world. South Africa has now adopted this in their own green taxonomy. And as a result, it comes across as gas is good and gas is not good. But by creating little loopholes, a little bit of that type of content in the standard or regulation for the EU, the risk is that countries and businesses who want to slow down as I mentioned at the beginning or delay things are going to use it as an opportunity to seek investment in that area. So the main ask to policymakers going to COP is be ambitious, be inspirational, but please also be aware of immense responsibility and opportunity you have that by setting the standard high and defending that standard, we don't want a back paddle. We want to actually move ahead further and faster. It's going to be really critical to get other companies to come along. And because we need to do that because it matters. Thank you. Thanks, Sophie. That's a very good point about Europe's secret weapon. We may not have an EU army, but we have an army of regulations at our disposal. So I want to bring back Lila and Terry who can now turn on their videos again and join us for the Q&A portion. And before I open it up to the floor, I do have one question for Lila. It's kind of a big picture question. What will define success at COP 27 and what will define failure? How will we know if we've had either? Do we have Lila on screen? Yes. You just want to unmute yourself, Lila. There you go. I think to begin with, there's a big trust deficit. So there needs to be a desire to bridge the gap between the north and the south. It's been said before, the east and the west as well. So any sign of global multilateral cooperation already is a success at this point because we're lacking that. I think the loss and damage package is going to be a big one. And I understand that it will be discussed and negotiated at the start of the COP. And there needs to be goodwill on both sides to figure out the right framework to settle that. So that's number two. And to me, another huge element of success is that we don't give up on the 1.5. We keep the ambition level high up. We know that there are ways to accelerate this transition. It requires efforts from both governments and businesses. And legislation, civil society, concerted effort. But let's not give up on the ambition level because then it's a slippery slope. And even if we need in the short term to make decisions that may increase emissions, we have to keep the goal of helping emissions by 2030 in the medium term. And that signaling at COP is going to be very important in my view. What's the worst case scenario for failure at COP 27, Laila? Well, there are many. I would just basically think that the worst case is huge distrust between the different parties because then it's really hard to get back on track. So the agreement between US and China before the Paris COP was extremely helpful, the bilateral agreement. The talks before Glasgow were helpful as well. So in my view, worst case scenario is a very unhelpful narrative that basically the big emitting countries don't talk to each other. We need fossil fuel in the short term. There's no way around. If that narrative emerges, I think that's a very bad scenario because it's very difficult to undo that. And the fact that Europe is going to Africa to supply gas is not particularly helpful for the climate debate and for the COP. And the 100 billion, we know that we're somewhere near 80, 90 billion potentially between this COP and the next. That has to be on the table. We have to pass that. That show of good will that was started in 2009, actually, in Copenhagen. So we have to move beyond that. There were trillions mobilized for good reasons for the COVID crisis, and there are billions mobilized now for securing energy. So we have to put that on the table and move beyond so that we can make progress on the topic. So yeah, I think there could be many things that could derail. And it's still, I think, really important that these yearly meetings take place under the auspices of the UN and with the intention of public good at large. And this is the only place we have to have this discussion. So we have to maintain this space and protect it. Thanks. Per, let me put the same question to you. With both of your hats on, scientist and politician, what is the worst case scenario for failure at COP 27? Well, of course, I totally agree with the worst case is if the trust that we need to build and create between the North and South, the rich and the poor, countries, et cetera, we need to create a stronger trust. And I mean, just to take one example from Glasgow is when India says that we will reach climate neutrality by 2070, that is, of course, not that they want to be that late. It's a signal that they still think that European Union and United States should do much more. And that is a typical part of the blame game that I was discussing earlier. And we need to get away from that blame game. And if we hear even more of that, then it would, to me, be a big failure. But if we could close that sort of gap, it would be, in a way, anyhow, a sort of success. Personally, though, I'm a bit, what do you say in English, divided when it comes to the 1.5 degree? Of course, I would love us to reach it. If I could have decided 20 years ago, I would have said 1 degree go, of course. But as I said, we will reach 1.5 degrees no matter what we do, roughly 10 years from now. It's still possible to bend the curve. You've all heard about the overshoot. And when I mentioned 2.5 degrees in 34 years from now, it's hopefully then the top of that overshoot. And then the curve will bend down again. And of course, it's still theoretically possible to be within 1.5 to 2 degrees at the end of the century. But at the same time, I still think that it's a bit problematic focusing on 1.5 degrees from one perspective. First is the fact that we will reach 1.5 degrees and how will people then react? And the other thing is, of course, this more sort of philosophical discussion about the need for hope. I think we're focusing on 1.5 degrees a lot because we want to give people hope. And that is good from one perspective. Of course, I mean, I have three children and two grandchildren. Of course, I want them to hope for a better future. But on the other hand, if we stuck in just saying that we can make 1.5 degrees, then we also sort of are decreasing the huge problem or catastrophe that we have ahead of us. So I'm sort of have mixed feelings about that. Let's take a question that's come in from the online audience. Again, you guys can put your questions in the chat for the panelists. Question comes from Pauline Herbalmez. A lot of conversation so far about how we need to accelerate and why, but very little on how we do that and how we action the need to accelerate. What is the way forward? What are the tangible solutions? So we heard a bit from Sophie already, some of the tangible actions. Alina, let me put this question to you. How do all of these countries that are working forward toward climate actions unite on tangible actions at COP 27? Well, that's a really good question. And I think one has to start by looking in the mirror and looking at what we're doing close to home. And we have of course responded to the IPCC 1.5 degree report which showed that more needed to be done. So some of you, all of you probably remember that our 2030 target when it was encoded in the Paris Agreement was at least 40%. So we have quite significantly scaled up our ambition by going to at least 55%. And with the RE-PAR EU, we expect ourselves to do what some of the panelists have also mentioned is to use the energy crisis as a cataclysmic event to fast forward the uptake of renewables to increase energy efficiency and really make the Green Deal our independent strategy. And I think it's the power of example that we want to bring to the COP. We want to engage with all our partners to tell them about the possibilities and indeed put our regulatory work forward. I very much like what Sophie was saying about our secret weapon. And I think I'll use that henceforth. Although it's not very secret. We have extensive public consultations and trilogues and the estimates and impact assessments and everything. So there's no secrets about what the commission is doing. But we're doing it not for ourselves, not for civil service, but we're doing it in order to serve the citizen and the public and the businesses to provide the regulatory predictability and clarity that then allows with confidence our stakeholders to move forward, fast forward and really make the change happen within the timeframes that is possible. And if I may, I reject the notion of a coppersafalia. Let's face it. The UNFCCC process alone is not going to save the world. The UNFCCC process is not going to end the war. So what it can do is to bring partners together within a multilateral framework to talk about climate change. And I think we do need to distinguish between the narratives of war and all evils and what's going to happen at the COP. So allow the negotiators to focus on what's at the table doing their work and their professionals. They've been doing this sometimes for decades. And I trust that the COP itself will bring about a result. It is about responsible stakeholder engagement, a media engagement, to not really feed into this over-dramatic narrative which easily can slip into something that's not helpful for multilateralism. Thanks. Yeah, that's a good point. It's important to keep the expectations realistic and also realize that the multilateral process just continuing to go is a good outcome in itself. Let's take a question from the audience. I see Philippa has a question here. Got a mic coming behind you. Hi, Philippa Nuttall. I'm a freelance journalist. I wanted to ask if we're not being a bit naive, because before both Paris and before Glasgow, or during Glasgow, the reason that the negotiations advance was essentially because the US and the Chinese negotiators came together. At the moment, China is refusing to speak to the US about climate change at all because of what's happening in Taiwan. So how realistic, either Laila or Peer, perhaps, or Alina want to comment, is it to expect any kind of progress on a multinational front? Also, in terms of the UK, the UK was a leader in Glasgow, but since then, I mean, it's still president at COP until November. And I think somebody just said, there can be no more fossil fuels we need to show as the West that we're moving forward. And yet the UK has just signed off 10 new oil and gas fields, is opening fracking, and is not putting forward energy efficiency policies. So how detrimental is that to the process? And then a second question, if I can't sorry. Alina, you mentioned in terms of loss and damage, the idea that we can look at existing processes rather than coming forward with a new fund and perhaps if you can give any extra detail about that. Thank you. So on the first question, I'd like to put that to Terri online. So Terri, how much are the geopolitics here going to get in the way, particularly the geopolitics between the US and China? If we have Terri. Can you hear me? That's a difficult question, I think. Yeah, I think we are. I wouldn't underestimate the progress that can be made when big countries and geopolitical leaders are able to agree. At the same time, I think it's say that the Glasgow Climate Pact, we have made some first announcements about phasing down coal, but of course that's capturing somehow the fur gas or the consensus that is being made. And I think we shouldn't underestimate those kind of outcomes, but we shouldn't overestimate them either. The value of COP and Alina was maybe saying something similar. The value of the COP is not reduced to such decisions. It's also very valuable for a space for annual assessments where we are, that we have collective, agreed, shared understanding of the science and of where the emissions were, the situation, and it should be valued as such. I think I wouldn't, I think all countries in their decisions at this point in time when they are doing decisions on coal or gas or other fields, I would personally not see a long future there, but that's up to, I think what's important is that we keep pricing of fossils. I think the financial sector is, that's where I come back to the Paris Agreement to Article 2, 1C, that all finance should be aligned to Paris Agreement goals. And I think that's where I would hope that in COP 27, we start making progress there, that we have this collective agreement of what that means and it starts being implemented by public banks, by development banks, by and also the sort of private sector finance. Anthony, from a business perspective, I wonder what's your take on this, watching the geopolitics unfold here? I mean, we're a business and we're very interested in creating solutions that can have a positive impact on climate change and we have those solutions ready. So our ask is to have more focus on the short-term timelines. We understand that there needs to be commitments further out in the future, but we need to have politicians that are made accountable and the way you can do that is to have these short-term three-year, four-year goals. So that's number one and then number two. I think Europe is showing the way when it comes to driving the regulatory environment, when it comes to the climate agenda. And we need to be good at sharing that experience with the rest of the world and come with the good examples of what can be achieved with progressive regulation. And it's not about having a socialistic society, it's about having a framework that can support and drive businesses, which at the end of the day can make commercial sense and can give them a competitive advantage. That's what the Chinese are also seeing. That was also mentioned earlier that they have seen that there is an enormous commercial opportunity for driving the renewable agenda. So I think coming with those tangible examples, I think that would also help as well. Alina, if you could take Phillipa's second question. And also, if you could just say something, I think Phillipa makes a point here that we've seen at a lot of the cops over the past years, even going back to Copenhagen, that a lot of the progress has always been dependent on cooperation between Washington and Beijing. And if we are losing that, what is the role, as Sophie mentioned, so that the EU doesn't just get crushed in between the US and China all the time? How can the EU step in? If the US and China aren't talking, what can the EU do? Maybe I start on the latter part. And it's quite entertaining to hear about the EU being crushed between the US and China. I don't think that's the case at all. I mean, the EU was in the center of the high ambition coalition that very much made the 1.5 degrees happen in the context of the Paris Agreement. So that was a coalition that centered around the EU coming together with the African Caribbean and the Pacific countries. And in a multilateral context, every vote has the same weight. So I think that would be my starting point, is that although some people may feel that recently China has been making some not so progressive noises around multilateralism, when you come to the bright lights of the conference and your leader, Xi Jinping, has been promoting multilateralism as a solution, I think it's going to be morally very, very difficult to kind of not support this construct that China was a part of creating. And by the way, China is talking. They are talking to us. And we will continue that conversation as we have before Paris and as we did before Glasgow. So while US is a very, very important player and a partner, I don't think we should consider that there are junior partners and more influential in the game of climate change. Now, a brief answer to the question on the loss and damage and specifically on a fund or a facility. We 100% agree that there needs to be more done to support those countries and populations that are suffering from losses and damages as a result of climate change. But we're not convinced that establishing a new fund with its lengthy procedures and administrative practices is going to be the solution. The solution is to have more access, more of speed, and more targeted assistance. And this is the conversation that we're very keen to have with our partners. There's some interesting propositions that come from the G7 presidency Germany in the form of a global shield. Secretary-General Guterres has come forward with an early warning proposal that has very, very interesting elements in it. So instead of trying to reinvent the wheel, we should try and work with the mechanisms that we have and scale up the funding that can be deployed soon and fast in a form of insurance or deploying early warning and humanitarian assistance as and when it is required. I'll stop there. Thanks. I think we had another question in the back here. Yes. Thank you very much. Good afternoon. Thank you very much for the great discussion. My name is Paul Ski and with PepsiCo. In fact, my question is directly for Lila. So I beg your pardon. I'm cutting you guys out. But Lila, it's linked to the Science-Based Targets Initiative which we subscribe to and which dictates what we can include in our reporting towards our climate ambitions. So I was very interested in the two thematic areas that you mentioned in your presentation, one of which was recognizing the investments that can be made beyond the value chain. So insets versus offsets. So I'd be very interested in two parts of that. One is how you think that might end up where it might land and what the effects might be on companies like PepsiCo. And secondly, did you think that was happening? And I missed this perhaps. Is this something that happens and concludes at COP27 or is this a longer term project? Thank you very much. So I think unfortunately Lila actually had to leave. Let me just check. But I think Sophie would be a good alternative to answer that. Just checking Lila's still there? No, I don't think so. So Sophie, maybe you could take that. Yes. I'm a little bit speaking with my previous hat on, which was when I was CEO of Smart Rate Center. We look specifically at investments or like insetting versus offsetting. So for those who are not familiar with the term, offsetting is you plant trees. Insetting is you invest in your own supply chain, right? But you're much better because you're basically putting money where the money is lacking in freight. There's a lot of money needed to be carbonized freight. Why not invest in the freight supply chain if you have one? So what we did with Smart Rate Center, we created one guideline for sustainable aviation fuel as a first example of how you could account for insetting in line of science-based targets and also meeting them. So I'm hoping Lila's unfortunately not online. I'm hoping that science-based target initiative will also look in a pragmatic way that if scope three, if investing in the supply chain is really gonna be critical to decarbonize, how can you find a way of recognizing that effort by companies instead of making it a very black and white approach of is your own direct emissions and anything that you do outside your company borders is not counting or not recognized because we're not gonna make it that way. To just give an example, a company like DHL has hundreds of thousands of subcontracted freight carriers. Now if investing in there would not count, then it's gonna be very tough for any company to meet it. So I'm hoping that that will help. I hope it answers your question, at least partially. Anthony, you wanted to come on on this as well. So it's also a conversation in our company. We also have science-based targets. We're a little bit unique because scope three is only one third of our total emissions, life cycle emissions, the other, the two thirds is in scope one and two. We think as a company it's incredibly important to ensure that the data quality and the methodology behind the calculations for scope one, two and three are in place. We're seeing that when it comes to scope three emissions it's still evolving and there is still a lot of cherry picking out there in terms of what data you pick and what data you don't pick. So I think it's really important that we get all that straight first because otherwise the credibility of companies making claims for net zero carbon and that kind of thing can be affected. We as a company we don't offset. We have a concern about the credibility around offsetting. We've seen with the CDMs previously that you can plant trees and then two years later they're not being looked after or they've burnt down or whatever. So we're very cautious about going down that route. So I think we have time for one more question. It's come in from online. This question is for Elina. So the questioner comes from Benjamin Stewart. Are there any key areas of European energy policy strategy that need to be reassessed on the basis of the environmental impact of strategic resource supply chains? So I think this question is referring to, I hopefully I'm getting this right for photovoltaics maybe causing environmental damage somewhere. Some of the resource supply chain issues that we've heard about as being a secondary effect of EU climate policy. Thanks and I think that's a really good question. Of course we are looking in the context of both the COVID crisis, the compromised supply chains in that context and also in the context of the current energy crisis. Sourcing of critical raw materials is going to be vital for the EU's plausible transition to net zero economy. This has to be done in a socially responsible way. And as you will know, all our proposals, regulations are subject to pretty rigorous impact analysis, impact assessments that look at social, economic and environmental aspects of any proposal. Now, do we always get it right? I would be honest if I said that we do and that's why we have inbuilt review clauses in our regulations that allow us to monitor continuously and revisit any approaches and policies that may have resulted in some undesirable impacts that were not of course intended from the outset. So I think we have a pretty safe set of policy implementation and design that should allow us to minimize that the kind of negative consequences in third countries, thanks. Per, let me put that question to you as well. Do you think legislation needs to be reviewed in light of the environmental impact of resources or is it enough just to do these review clauses and evaluate the information as it comes in? No, I really need, I really think that we more often need to have the really, really big picture. I mean, from a systematic point of view, the climate transformation is after all quite simple. We need to stop using fossil energy and we need to reverse the flow of carbon atoms. So we take it from the atmosphere and store it in the ground, especially when it comes to forestry and agriculture. That is stuff that we can do during this decade quite fast actually. But then when it comes to the bigger transformation, if we're focusing on energy or as you mentioned, we would need or we would like to have, I think you said 300 million electrical, yeah, in 2030. And of course we could have had that in 2030 if we had started 10 years ago, but now time is running up and we still, it's basically not that we need 300 million electrical vehicles. The thing is that we need to get rid of the fossils. So in other words, we will end up quite soon in a situation that we maybe then have to have 100 million cars or whatever and share that and really start to think way outside of the usual boxes and limitations. And once again, of course, from a business case, this will create opportunities as well, but we really need to shift the view of what is needed to be done and what is possible to be done. And of course that then is after all quite different in different sectors of the industry. Well, that's all the time we have for this panel. I want to thank the panelists very much for some excellent insights, have a round of applause. And we're now going to go back out there to cyberspace for our closing remarks. Our closing remarks are coming from Leonora Gewesler, federal minister for climate action, environment, energy, mobility, innovation and technology for Austria. Minister? Thanks a lot. Thank, I hope you can hear me now fine, but I take that as a yes. So thank you so much for having me at the conclusion of this summit today that I can be part of this summit. And after the input from a lot of distinguished colleagues before we will see how much I can still add to the debate and to what has been said, but I'm honored to be able to join the deliberations and give you my take on these issues. So it won't be a surprise that I've been asked to discuss the compatibility of Europe's energy security efforts with our climate goals. And I think both Pascal Confa and Sven Giegolt have made comments on this before, but I think I'll nevertheless put some effort on this as well, because I think that the current situation is without a doubt one of the most crucial points we will experience when it comes to realizing the energy transition and thus our climate goals. And Putin's actions in Ukraine have caused a wide variety of reactions in energy politics with some calling for more investments in fossil and gas infrastructure, infracting to name the few in the UK, for example, but also in Austria and some betting on gas infrastructure improvement. And then there are some like myself and I think many of us who are here joining the summit today who work to make this situation a catalyst for the green energy transition. So we have to become and it's really the no brain are also out of this situation. We have to become independent from fossil fuels as quickly as possible. And the most urgent challenge of course is to reach independence from Russian gas. In our case, the most urgent part is Russian gas. I think this is the only way to really react to the attack on Ukraine. But I won't deny that there are no quick fixes. We won't achieve this independence within a matter of weeks or months. And this also means we have to make decisions in the short run that are uncomfortable. So I can give you an example from my personal history when I became minister in 2020, one of my first actions was that I was handed over the last piece of coal that was burned in an Austrian coal-fired power plant. It's now moved to the house of Austrian history. So it's now a piece in a museum. So I didn't think back then and probably not at any point before in my life that I would be the one who might have to ask for permission to restart this coal power plant only a couple of years later. And I also have dedicated quite of my time to the question of gas supply and fossil fuel supply. And I will speak some more on that, but bear with me. I'll come to the climate side of things and the energy transition side of things in a minute. So of course security of supply and I don't need to reason in this, I think in this round of distinguished guests is a main concern at the moment. So many things have happened in Austria since the start of the war in order to achieve that from gas storage, the implementation of the Europe wide regulation. So we've also passed the 80% mark in Europe and in Austria at the beginning of this week. So in terms of winter preparedness, we are working on demand reduction both at European level and on national level. Austria proposed for this European wide auction mechanism for further demand reduction at the European level which can really be a win-win between industry and policy making and security of supply. I also appreciate the efforts of the commission to establish a EU energy platform for the joint purchase of gas. Although I do think we have to move here more quickly and more decisively so that to act as a union is really then deserving its name. Where I see a lot of questions at the moment and not so many answers yet is the discussion on the imposition of a price cap on gas imports that we will have another round of energy ministers council this week. So I think that will be on the agenda again. Of course, security of supply concerns are crucial for any minister but for me quite on the top of the debate. But having said that, we do need to have a common European response to current energy prices which will still be necessary despite the fact that markets have come down a bit in the last weeks but we definitely made progress on the 30th of September in the energy council as many of you followed with agreed on three points, demand reduction and a solidarity contribution by fossil fuel companies and a contribution by for inframarginal suppliers who, yeah, but I don't, sorry, I'm losing my English for this but you know what we decided on on September basically a revenue cap, let's put it like that, a revenue cap for inframarginal producers at 180 euros per megawatt hours. So those measures are steps in the right direction and I'm sure they were part of the debate already earlier in the seminar or in the summit but with many others I think this is not the end of the line we quickly need a proposal from the commission for a general decoupling of electricity prices from gas prices and I do think and I think many of you share this view is that we can say that the market as it is is not functioning any longer properly. And the last remark on gas because many of you might have witnessed today's events or already from Friday only today we announced and that's maybe the bridge between the short and the long-term maybe we announced that we will file or we filed already on Friday a legal challenge against the commission's delegated act on the taxonomy as we are convinced that fossil gas, non-nuclear power can be considered as green investments and this is apart from the fact that there will be investment at the moment or there will be investment still in a couple of years but they're not part of a green story of financial investments. That's why we filed a legal challenge against the commission that was handed in at the court on Friday and that's probably what that's why I why do I say that's maybe the bridge between security of supply and the climate side of the story because I think all of us share the view that the only way out of the energy security and the energy crisis we are in in the short, the medium and the long-term is energy efficiency and renewables. That's the only way to move forward. So that's why we absolutely need to use this situation as a catalyst for the energy transition and that's indeed my central consideration because of course we have a core concern at the moment, security of supply and the situation on the gas side but we have to have it very clear in our minds in the medium and in the long-term fossil gas will and it has to become irrelevant in our energy mix and so moving out and moving away from gas and not giving counterproductive incentives like into taxonomy needs to be part of our solution and both on the security of supply side and on the price side because renewables are much cheaper because they are the way also to lower prices again on the markets. So meaning energy transition needs to be faster and quicker than ever before. The climate crisis and the invasion of Ukraine and the resulting energy crisis are compelling reasons for that albeit on maybe different timelines now but it's absolutely clear the future has to be renewable and efficient. And so to bring some examples from Austria as a change also in the debate we have adopted our renewables expansion act going towards 100% renewable until 2030 already last year. We are streamlining permitting procedures who have permitting faster than before especially on the environmental impact assessment. We are debating a law now that will go into parliament this fall by phasing out or ruling out actually as of 23 new gas heating systems in building. We support the switch from fossil fuel heating systems so existing oil and gas heating systems to renewable heating systems increase the subsidies for that from 2023 to 2025 there will be a budget of 1.14 billion Euro for that purpose for supporting the switch to renewable heating systems in our building stock and people use it. There is actually really a run on these subsidies. So people really I put it quite bluntly in Austria are fleeing out of their gas heating systems. So also at the European level we see the same spirit and the same movement with the repower you plan we have exactly the same set of actions to reduce dependency. There's short term measures on the security of supply but there is increased renewables and increased efficiency targets. I'm sure you've discussed that today already before massive investment in renewables and grid infrastructure boosting industrial decarbonization and much, much more. We haven't done all that's necessary until now that's very clear but we're moving consistently and I do think improving our goals is a needed and sensible reaction right now that we are doing at the European level. I think and that's also why I'm very happy to be part of this debate today that countries, companies, consumers in the face of limited resources the threat of an economic crisis and efforts to divide us by playing different interests against one another. We need to act in a spirit of a common understanding that we need to solve a crisis and in a spirit of solidarity in order to bear and to manage the enormous economic, the enormous crisis but also to leverage the enormous economic power that the union represents. And I'm totally aware that companies are under a lot of pressure at the moment that's also why I'm convinced we still need to support and cushion hard falls both in the private and the company side of things but also in the economic realm on the company side there is I think an opportunity in this situation in making really the shift to efficient production processes to energy independence and climate neutral production processes that especially now also make a lot of economic sense. And I know and we've heard from Mr. Abbott from Rockwell that many are already thinking along these lines but I think there's really an opportunity in the call to action there. That makes sense for energy intensive companies that makes sense for not only the energy intensive companies every contribution matters makes Europe more autonomous, saves money, moves us closer to our climate friendly future and I'm convinced that many, many, many also on the employee side will join and support the effort on this side. To come to a conclusion because I know I'm already running out of my time I want to mention one more point because I've had this in many international debates and I've heard this was also debate today. The global climate talks are around the corner and I can see that some are concerned about the dynamics it could have the situation in Europe could have on the global efforts that Europe is now diversifying gas sources that we're discussing about fracking even or building new gas infrastructure but it's just a completely wrong argument to put it very bluntly. And as I've tried to outline before I think Europe's response is more forward-looking than what it's portrayed in the international discussions. We don't just shift our sources we're really changing our energy systems and we're already seeing first results of that. In terms of efficiency using less gas in terms of renewables push we are in Austria to just give you one number from 2019 to 22 we increased our photovoltaics installation by six and it doubled from 2021 to 2022. So there will be an absolute record year for renewables in Austria this year. So I'm quite honest and I'm picking up on what Sven Giegeld and Pascal Kompfer already said before. I think those who argue from that other countries need to reduce now their climate ambition because Europe would be backtracking are either not well informed or they use this situation in Europe as an excuse to lower the ambition in the international climate talks and I think this is really unacceptable. It would be a loss for climate it would be a loss for the future. It would be also a loss for those countries and region because I'm sure that the competitiveness of the future lies in green policies and green products and green processes. So I think when it comes to the COP 27 in three weeks time we need to do everything that we can to keep up the ambition when it comes to greenhouse gas reduction we left Glasgow with commitments we need to work and start from these commitments and work on implementing them. We need the big emitters all big emitters also on board and present ambitious contribution. And I think one contribution that Europe could still make and there I'm working with many colleagues to make this the reality is to make sure that or to help make sure that the fit for 55 package actually comes into being still. So to finalize the trial log before the COP I think this would be another strong signal for Europe to show that our ambition in climate is just as high as it always has been and there's no backtracking on the European side of things. Of course we will discuss a lot more issues in Charmander's shake from loss and damage to adaptation but I think we just need to be very clear we're in tremendously difficult times and you can I think you will hear the same sentence from all of the energy ministers in Europe but ultimately it's a wake up call and then a call to action just now and it's you know I know it's cheaper and better to act now and to react later and I think this must be the motto of our actions even in very challenging times. So I'll leave it at that because I already see that I'm running out of time also by the signal that my camera has moved back to small so I thank you for your attention at this point and if there's still time I'm happy to take questions. Thank you very much Minister Gevesler I think that point about how Europe is being portrayed internationally how the situation here is being portrayed is well taken in this room I think we've heard that several times today. So thank you very much we're now going to move on to our final closing remarks. I would like to welcome to the podium again Elliot Whittington, director of CLG Europe and the Green Growth Partnership. Thank you Dave and I mean it broadly just falls to me to do the thank yous and to do the wrap up and I felt that there are many many people to thank firstly Dave for giving us first class facilitation and chairing throughout the day I think it's been an excellent enriched conversation through with your shaw hand at the tiller so thank you very much for that and maybe a round of applause for Dave. I do want to thank all the speakers it's been a fascinating session and I feel like so many insights have come forward so thank you to everybody who's shared their thoughts and shared their thinking while I'm talking about the speakers we have had I also want to take a moment to talk about speakers that we don't have so we there's a friend of the Green Growth Partnership who has been who was due to speak today and has been has spoken at many of our events previously who's not with us anymore which is Mara Prachachione from the commission so I just you know I know for many of us in Brussels worked closely with him and wanted to take a moment to kind of acknowledge his contribution and the way that he's contributed to this agenda. I also obviously need to thank the venue, the IT people and my whole team so Ursula and Roman and the whole CLG Europe team for all they have done in bringing this event together it's been very smooth and it's been an innovation for us making a hybrid event work there's a few things to learn but I think it's been a brilliant success in terms of being able to do something where we can have great discussions in the room that are visible and engaged with by a much broader community so I really appreciate everything that people have done there. So just to bring it together and just to kind of take stock of the conversation I feel like what we've heard today is this sort of really powerful consensus about the direction of travel as most recently articulated by Minister Gewesler really powerful kind of commitment from business and government and parliament in terms of their resolve to move forward in the direction of that movement and clarity as well that it's quite hard there are real negotiations that there is a challenge to specific implementation to the granularity of getting things done it's hard to get by in and get maintained by in and get kind of popular and public support it's hard to get agreement from across Europe and also internationally we've obviously got COP 27 looming it's hard to get that clarity in terms of the direction of travel but I also think that we've also heard today I mean I think SEPA really clearly articulated it we've heard about that there is a real cost to not moving, to not facing up we've heard that there are real case studies of action most recently in terms of Austria but also you can read our report for some more stuff that's in detail but from our business speakers from our government speakers you've heard those real kind of stories and case studies of what is possible you've heard obviously the testimony about the power of what you have to offer it's superpower, it's secret power it's secret weapon in terms of its solidarity and its market influence and these are all real things which allow us to go forward so if I can leave you with one final thought today it's the fact that we need to you know there are real challenges but there are real dynamics and ingredients and institutions that can allow us to move forward and we have to there is an imperative to move forward as well so we have to acknowledge this as we move from today into you know conversations around the the Environment Council, the Energy Council as we move from today into COP 27 and all of the events and conversations around that if we can take the energy and the dynamism and the examples of success from this room into those conversations and use that as the basis to move forward that would be excellent and it only remains to me to thank you all for listening and joining us today and look forward to the next conversation with you Thank you