 Good morning everyone and welcome to this very important panel on an issue important for the sustainable development goals important for climate change, but not often discussed I'm welcoming this morning five very impressive experts on the topic of water We have Paul Dwight Jensen Jensen excuse me Elizabeth Watuti Who's the CEO I should introduce who they are the group president of Gunfa's and CEO a founder of the green generation initiative Elizabeth Watuti prime minister Mark Ruther senior minister Tharman of Singapore and James Quincy the chairman and CEO of the Coca-Cola company So what I find fascinating about this topic is I when I think about water I Remember that iconic photograph from 1972 of the blue marble that we look down at the world And it is 71 percent water and yet only one percent of that is fresh water And while today we don't have an actual shortage It's not in the right places for the right people and and and there are four billion people who for at least a month Of the year don't have access to clean water And yet as we think about climate transition it is critical not just for food for agriculture For drinking but also for the minerals that we need to to support climate change And so this morning we're going to use this opportunity to explore the many dimensions of how water is used and Take this opportunity to help our friend prime minister Hutter as he prepares for the UN conference on water Which is happening for the first time in 44 years Which he is co-hosting as we think about some of the recommendations and opportunities that we have to to preserve and conserve and Distribute water going forward So I wanted to start with you Senior Minister Tharman because you have been working on an initiative to really look at the full economics of water and I was hoping you could share with us this morning some of the Frameworks that you've developed to think about this issue in a broader context Well, I think current first you've summarized the problem very well It's remarkable Most of us living in parts of the world where you've gotten used to Getting a bit of water when we need it just don't realize that such a large part of humanity Doesn't have access to safe drinking water A half of humanity doesn't have access to safe sanitation. I think the first thing we have to recognize is That water is going to be the first casualty already is the first casualty of the climate crisis It's intrinsic and it's intertwined with the climate crisis as a casualty But also as part of the solution Because what's happening now is that? Climate water food and energy are becoming more and more insecure at the same time and They're feeding into each other If we keep over extracting water if we keep polluting water It affects the wetlands. It affects the natural carbon sinks It makes it even more difficult to address the climate crisis. So we're in a vicious cycle now We're in a vicious cycle that it means we have to address each of these problems of the global commons together The Dutch government has initiated a major new review global review an independent review Of this water crisis and the solutions required We're launching it later today my coach as an eye But fundamentally it now requires us to realize that it's not just what happens in the Sahel or Some part of the world which is already in severe water stress But it's a hydrological cycle that affects everyone in the world. That's why it's part of the global commons Not just an issue crying out for attention because a large part of humanity is affected But because it's a global issue What happens in one part of the world ends up in another part of the world? That's intrinsic to the climate crisis and water is intertwined with the climate crisis Thank you James as As the chairman of Coca-Cola you have often discussed that water just as Senior Minister Tharman did is integral to the climate crisis and can't be separated and you've launched a number of initiatives That that look at water as part of that system Can you tell us a little bit more about what you've been you've been doing sure? Well, I think self-evidently when you're in the beverage business Water is not just an overall issue for the society. It's intrinsic to the business. We're in You know and so when we look at ESG in our role and and very simply we always think you know You can't have a successful business if you don't have a successful society And so we have to think about our impacts on society whether that's water or waste with plastics the carbon footprint there Or our impact on generating jobs and several other things and so we very early on focused on water because it's self-evident in our products We set out a goal to return all the water. We use In making up averages to the to the environment directly or through replenishment by 2020 Actually, we got there in 2015 So we've been returning all the water we use since 2015. We're now well over a hundred percent and we continue to do so But having reached that goal. We actually realized there is no global average returning it all globally Doesn't necessarily solve everyone's problems Because actually in the end water is a local issue as well as a global hydrological issue So we've laid out our 2030 water security strategy to really focus in On those areas in the world where we have operations where the water stress is particularly Acute and really get into can we help out in those areas and they of course As the senior minister pointed out tend to be in the more vulnerable parts of the world more vulnerable societies less income Less infrastructure, so we're focused there and of course once you start drilling down You very quickly get to the to the point which actually 70% of water extraction is used for small holding agriculture or agriculture in general and actually Agriculture accounts for a big piece of climate change. So the two things come together At the local farm level in these water stressed areas So we've we've done a lot of work and we have a lot of focus on how can we help? Smart agriculture take place. How can we help them extract far less water? Generate actually as much or better Quantities of food and we've done we're doing for example a big project in Bangladesh 33 million people are going to be impacted working with a whole series of other businesses in Joe So we're going from a kind of a global water neutral to how can we really focus in on the high stress scarcity areas? And really focusing on on on agriculture where the extraction is taking place and try and bring that together and solve Water and climate with the complementary programs So Paul James is talking about the integration of those two your company is Right at the heart of the water challenge and trying to support that. Why do you think? So few companies are now talking about it to date talking about water and water scarcity Yeah, thank you. Thank you very much. And you know, I think it's fantastic that we have Great attention now here at at Weff and we can sit here as strong water champions But but I think in in general, I think we we do not care enough about this precious precious resource, you know, it's As the senior minister also said and we all know, you know, there's there's just a limited amount of water accessible for for life and for the society and But it is a vital part basically of any process any product that we are that we are producing water is there and it and it's needed And maybe just an example and and there's many of them And not many people are thinking about how much water does it take to produce one liter of milk for instance, right? I mean you may think about how much does does does the cow add into emissions or you know, what did it take to produce the cotton? But one liter of milk takes 600 liter or more 600 liters of water to produce. It's simply simply amazing. So, you know, solving the Solving the climate challenge. It's not just about the emissions. It's also about solving solving water And it actually it's not either or it goes hand in hand. And I think that's super important to realize as also highlighted by by by James But I think actually we forget to add it into our strategies. We forget to add it into the total into end of our supply chain in in in our thinking In that and that I think we need to do something about and maybe just another maybe a little bit scary scary example But but it goes hand in hand, you know around electrical vehicles and batteries, you know, it takes two million liters of water to produce one kilo of lithium Right. It is absolutely insane. So, you know, and then sometimes, you know, or actually the way it produces is in a water scarce area Right in Peru or place in China. It's just water scarce. So, so that is that is super super damaging. So, you know, I think the The Paris Agreement and the 1.5 degree goal or target that we that we all set together. I think it's something that we can now all relate to And I think it means it means a lot to all of us. It has made us all aware of what it is and we actually building scale based on that And honestly, we have a common language on climate, but we don't have that on water. And that's that's in my view that is exactly what we need to have in order to progress towards a common goal Wonderful. Thank you. So, Elizabeth, you are here in two purposes really one as the founder of the green generation initiative and the other as the next generation. We used to describe there's an American expression which is so inappropriate. We used to say at the coal face which means you're right at the edge of the problem. It feels like for climate change and water. That's not really the analogy we want to use, but you are inheriting the problems that we have created and would love to hear from you your advice to us what you're what you're seeing first of all in the impact of water and your advice to us on how to to start to think more specifically about those impacts. Thank you. When I hear about the phrase a freshwater future. It's the people whose daily lives are still so far away from this phrase that I think about every day. And I want to share with you very two reasons and personal experiences that come in mind every other time so that we can have these experiences and these people in our hearts and minds even as we talk about this freshwater future because there's a big link between freshwater nature climate and the food crisis and the first experience is the ongoing drought that is devastating countries across the Horn of Africa. And right now almost three million people in my country Kenya and over 20 million people in neighboring countries across the Horn of Africa are facing extreme hunger that has been filled by the prolonged drought that's going on. And this has caused consecutive rainy seasons to fail and still brings us to the question of water as well. And also the war in Ukraine has also continued to exacerbate this really already terrifying high levels of food insecurity. And just over a week ago I visited one community that Swajia County in north eastern part of Kenya. And this is a community whose 80% of livelihoods come from their livestock. But again what I witnessed there was really deeply shocking and a deeply shocking example of how this crisis is impacting the frontline communities and also how this interconnected crisis of the food nature and climate crisis is impacting the people across the African continent. And this was about the dead and dying livestock around. They don't have water to drink let alone the fresh water. There's no water access to them at all. And these are people that also are hungry and desperate and they're losing hope for this future that we are talking about right now today. So the daily reality of the life of these people that I met in Swajia County is very far away from what the idea of the sustainable development goal number six calls for. That's a clean water and sanitation for all. Their life is completely away from this future that we are talking about. And the second one is a story that I want to share about when I stumbled upon what I thought was a dump site during a program that we had with young people in Kenya. And to my surprise we first thought we were standing on a dump site. But the solid ground we first thought was the fact that these communities around this place depend on this space. And to our surprise actually these were supposed to be a stream. But again it was flowing with plastic waste produced from fossil fuels. And we thought to ourselves what would these communities be using each and every day as water because this is the only source of water as a stream. But again there's no water for them at the end of the day. So my thought is of course the pledges from the businesses and governments to offset the loss of freshwater and natural ecosystems are to be welcomed. But again we have been here before with pledges you know they're made but they're not met and delivery and accountability are crucial as well. And this is something that young people and civil society are fighting for in the climate space with respect to the net zero pledges. It's about committing and doing it because the climate crisis impacts are not waiting to hit in the future. They're affecting every day lives from different people across the continent and across the world as well. So if the goal is to engage young people and harness energy towards an international moment for freshwater in 2023. I think the best thing that governments and companies can do is to stop talking about nature and climate change in silos and actually recognize the interconnections and start telling the news stories about what is important and also about what is possible. And right now the life sustaining relationship that we have between nature and humanity is not being recognized. It's not being valued and neither it's not being protected. And what we are seeing is a way in which humanity is perpetuating an ecosystem that is actually destroying nature and nature is being destroyed faster than it can even regenerate itself. So we have to stop actually destroying our own life support system if we are to have that kind of future that we are talking about. And it has to start right now because we cannot wait for the next years to turn things around. We need to do it where we still have time. Thank you. Well that is quite a well aimed indictment that all of us pledges made and not met. So we have the opportunity now with this UN conference on water to do better. So Prime Minister what are your goals for this upcoming conference and how can all of these different stakeholders support those goals. Basically it is about just articulating them. The two are first of all not again in conference which is not leading to any action. So it has to be action oriented. It's the first conference in 44 45 years on taking place on water. Why was Tajikistan Tajikistan is a glacier country. The Netherlands is laying half of the country below sea level. When you land at Schiphol airport it is four meters below sea level. So we like to say God created the earth the Dutch created the Netherlands with all the dice etc for all the centuries. So it's from let's say the mountains to the sea. We could together Tajikistan. And we both want this conference to be action oriented as possible and it has to be cross-sectoral. I'm so happy with the fact that you are here on this panel. You bring the perspective from your country and what it means for people in real life in day to day life if we cannot solve this problem. And if you again at the conference where we have all this posturing and nice talks and then saying well we should do this and then five years later nothing has happened. And this is integral. SDG 6 is not standing on its own. It has an impact on so many other SDG goals. And therefore it has to be cross-sectoral. You mentioned this example of small farming. Small farming for example. And when you look for example at a thing I learned about how you can produce compost from waste and therefore reduce the amount of water a farmer needs to use to produce his crop. So it is also this type of small innovations which will bring us forward. And you can only get there if you do this across the various sections of our economy. And therefore that would be my final comment on your question. We need the involvement of big business. I do not believe we can solve these kind of issues if it is just governments or NGOs that is the three governments NGOs and the business community. Because the Koch you the company I work for Unilever and so many others we collectively these companies have so much knowledge but also the logistical power to get this done to get with NGOs and governments. So that's how we want to shape this conference and to make it again as action oriented as possible. Wonderful. So Senior Minister Tharman, Elizabeth left us with a really powerful image of a river of plastic, a dump site. You've just come back from a conference in Geneva talking about these issues. How can we inject that sort of imagery that's the combination of plastics, fossil fuels, recycling, water shortages, food into this dialogue more effectively do you think? And how do we link those economics in a way that really can land and be understandable? So I think we have to be first motivated by what Elizabeth said that this is basically a crisis of lives and livelihoods for such a large part of humanity. And we need to find as Prime Minister Rota said, practical concrete solutions to address it. The key that links the two is governance at every level, local, regional, federal, within sovereign states and international. We have to, one way or another, we're going to have to invest more. And we're not going to be able to mobilize and sustain investments at a much higher level. Essentially, if you're talking about, if you just talk about the low and middle income countries, it needs about $300 billion per year, $300 billion per year. Varsely more than what is going into all the innovations required today. Just to scale up innovations, innovations which already exist but need scaling up by the public and private sector. And to do that, we need governance changes at every level. This is not the responsibility of a water official or water ministry. It is a whole environment responsibility. In Singapore, not that I want to dwell on my own country's experience. Every quarter, the entire cabinet gets a report on water. It's not the responsibility of just the ministry in charge of the environment. The entire cabinet gets a report on water. And the Prime Minister, starting from our first Prime Minister, takes deep interest in it and there's an exchange on the report. The latest metrics, what's happening here, how do we solve the latest problem? It's a whole-of-government approach. We were vulnerable, like the Dutch were historically. And necessity is not just the mother of invention, but the mother of governance, of solution-oriented whole-of-government governance. And it's not difficult to do, just having that governance mindset where everyone is involved, because it's not the water ministry or the environment ministry that's the one that's using water. It's the economic ministries, it's everyone. And we need a whole-of-government and whole-of-society approach to solving the problem, starting with valuing water, which is not just a market concept, it's not a commercial concept. It's a public sector concept. It's a concept that's essential to solve this problem for humanity because of value water. So these are solvable problems. We can mobilize the funding required. We can invest in an equitable fashion to scale up solutions that exist around the world with the right governance. So you said that the governance mindset, it's not hard. It looks hard given that we aren't doing it yet. But I think we do have this opportunity, as Prime Minister Goetze just said, we have the right representatives of stakeholders here on this stage. And it would be, I'd like to turn to talking about some of the suggestions that we have to help us think about some of the initiatives that should be on the table. Senior Minister Tharmin, you had referenced something that Paul also said, which is we don't have a powerful metric yet for this. It's a whole-of-society problem, but not something simple to measure yet. James, you've been ahead of this issue for two decades. What are your suggestions? What are the sort of initiatives that you, from your vantage point, would suggest be on the agenda for the conference that we see coming in 2023? I think just to start with the Senior Minister, there is an intersection of governance at its multiple levels and the natural interests of business and the natural interests of communities. And let me throw out some examples which are very familiar to me. I spent many years working in Latin America and we had an objective of replenishing water and we looked at it and actually you go actually reforestation because when you are in a lot of hilly areas the water runs very quickly down the hill if there aren't trees and actually scrapes off the earth and runs very quickly out into the ocean. So it doesn't go into the aquifer so the aquifer is not replenished. You need to slow down the movement of the water which is trees. Why aren't there any trees? Where did they all go? The local community burnt them for fuel. They're poor. They don't have natural fuel sources. So unless the government brings electricity to the area they're going to keep chopping down the trees you put in and then the water is going to keep running off. So we worked with a number of governments to make sure that infrastructure was coming to the villages that allowed the community to see value in keeping the trees. Actually you generate a market dynamic whereby they are then the custodians of the forest involved in planting and keeping them. So they have a market-based economy. The government has brought in the infrastructure on electricity. The water runs off slower. There's less oil erosion. The aquifer gets worse. So you need all these things to come together. There's no...the government can make the framework but unless there's a market-based answer it's not going to work. The same with plastics. You need a circular economy. You don't need to just attach a philosophical public service value. You need a marketplace value to it and that is what will generate circularity. And that is not just a dynamic that will play out in the water-stressed areas. The examples from Kenya, my example from Latin America they tend to be more arid water stress. Let's go swing our way back to Europe, back to the Netherlands which has got an abundance of water. Actually Europe ends up with much more flooding because of climate change. So actually there are parts of the world where we need to redo the marshes. Actually, funnily enough, right next to our Dutch plant is a marsh area. We're interested in regenerating the marsh. The marsh because we don't want our plant to be flooded. So with the right planning frameworks you can see the regeneration of these natural solutions. You have to bring together the government framework. The community around it has to see a market-based reason to support that solution and not do the opposite and then businesses can come together. And I think that actually generates solutions for us that are expandable and can really make a difference to the water and the climate change. Paul, what would you add to that from the perspective of the private sector? Yeah. Well, thank you. I think I'll just kind of build a little bit here on my own story here. You know, Cornfors is founded back in 1945, by the way, by my grandfather. And you know, saving water, caring about climate, caring about the world as such is not new to us. But I think as also a relatively new CEO here into the business, there's a couple of elements here that actually help frame where we are going. And one of them being, I think, the SGDs helped us really articulate kind of the overall messages, the purpose, the direction of where we are going. So that helped Cornfors also in that journey. And then I think the SBTIs, so the science-based targets now makes it concrete, right? And I think that is great. It makes it really actionable. Now we can go do something about it. Is it easy? No, it's not. And then we would have also done it some time ago, wouldn't we? But I think back to that I mentioned earlier, we have a common language on climate. And I think with that and that development now with the SGDs and the SBTIs, this has given us the opportunity to take our own medicine. And I think we have some great examples here in the room from the private side, but also from a country level where fantastic examples are live right now that others can be inspired from. So again, I think that way of moving forward on climate is exactly the same recipe we will need on water. And I think that is a great opportunity to talk about because we are here and here in this forum, but I've also had the chance to actually talk to numerous CEOs and other influencers down here in Davos. And you know, people are excited about this. People want to contribute. But what they're looking for is that common framework, that common language, common targets, so that we can move in the same direction together. And I think we can definitely do that. And I think also as water champions here, I think in the next year, it's coming actually quite close, so we need to move faster, Mr. Prime Minister, on it and getting to the facts around that. Wouldn't it be fantastic to actually build a kind of 1.5 degree goal on water? I mean, something that we can really all targeted go for. And that is something that I believe would be fantastic. And actually there's also a lot of technology that's also available to solve some of the issues out there already. And we will for sure like to be part of that journey and contributing to a better world when it comes to water. So James and Paul, to both of you, just to stay on the private sector initiative, what do you think is missing? You mentioned a clear target that there is energy behind this. And yet it's not something, frankly, that we read about much. We hear a lot about companies, ESG goals, but not water specifically. What do you think is missing? How do we motivate more companies to be out front talking about this and integrating it into their ESG strategies? I think the simple answer is no pun intended, you've got to go with the flow. And if going with the flow means you've got to attach it to climate change, then we attach it to climate change. And it is a powerful part of the solution set for climate. And we have our own water goals. I mean, we've been on the journey. It's so important to us we have our replenishment goals and scarcity goals. But in general terms for most businesses, I think we need to attach it to climate. And again, it has to be a market force. The senior minister said if water doesn't have a price, it will never be valued. I mean, it takes how many millions of leaders to make a kilo of lithium? That's a lot of water. So we have to value these things. And that's been one of the great barriers on water is that actually, as I said, 70% of the water is used by small scale agricultural farmers. Imposing a price on them is very economically damaging. But unless water has a value, it's going to be very difficult. So if we could value water in the same way we could value carbon, then the market will be the mechanism to drive the result. Yeah, maybe just a short follow up to that. I mean, can you make it sound a little bit easy and like that everybody has got DSG and a focus on water? I don't think so. So I think this is a major shout out to the world to actually start putting this on the agenda. I think big, small, gigantic government, what not, companies, they can all engage in this journey here. But let's create a common framework so everybody can move in the same and the right direction here on this. So more emphasis. Thank you. So Elizabeth, you spoke really powerfully about the impacts on the community. And James mentioned some initiatives that we're working in Latin America to create market initiatives. We've seen a great example for lithium that some companies are now doing direct extraction, which uses very little water in part due to community pressure. What else do we need to hear from communities and how would you push us to act more directly given what you're seeing? I think I would say this is actually a human problem. And it's not that we lack the technology that we need. It's not that we lack innovations. It's not that we lack everything that we need right now. It's a human problem. And for us to solve this human problem, we're going to need human solutions. It's all about how we really take these issues into our hearts and into our minds. Because if we do not have these frontline communities at the center of every decision we are making and at the center of every action we are taking, then we're still going to be moving so many steps backwards. And I think for me, it would be great if we have our way of living in a way that we are actually not taking from the arts, but actually giving more back to the arts ecosystems. Because our way of doing things is in a way that we take so much from the arts ecosystems, but only give too little back to the arts. And what happens is that we are the ones who continue to bear the worst impacts of these impacts. Because the communities that I've talked about, these are communities that live in a continent that contribute less than 4% of the global greenhouse gas emissions. But they are the ones that bear the biggest brand of these impacts. So how can we still continue in our normal way of doing things where we still take away from nature and give less back to nature? I think also what we need to do is to think around how we can go beyond the circular economy and just actually move towards a regenerative one. Because our systems right now, like I mentioned, our economic models right now are not really putting our nature, our ecosystems as a priority. And every time we talk about nature, we talk about water, we talk about all these things. But we don't talk about how we can actually still continue to protect the already existing and intact ecosystems. Because if we continue to carry on as before, then we're not going to be solving any problem. We're only going to be making things worse for these communities. This is about lives. It's about livelihood. It's about people who are not waiting for these things to impact them tomorrow. So they need us to take immediate action. So this is about accountability. It's about delivering because we've been here before. We've had these things before and we continue to hear them. But unless we allow ourselves to actually be accountable and actually be responsible for the fact that these lives and livelihoods depend on the decisions we make today, then I think we will still be talking about the same things every now and then. But I think it's possible for us to actually turn these things around. But we actually have to be moved by taking into account that these are human problems and they need human solutions as well. So human problems, human solutions. You've got some initiatives on the stage. How can we encourage all of these stakeholders to help continue to put more drive behind these initiatives? What's missing in your view in this discussion that we should think about for next year? Well, first of all, this is a fantastic panel because we have all these various societal forces here. The business community, government, NGOs, society. My take out for this discussion and this debate is that you have to focus on a couple of issues. One, of course, is governance. And governance could maybe even help to get the human focus back as soon as possible at the local level. I know that in my country we have these local water authorities. They are helping 25 local water authorities in countries in Africa and other parts of the world in 15 countries on very practical stuff. So that there's practical stuff focusing on, for example, how to adapt to climate change, a big one, but also how to improve and expand service delivery, very practical, and to improve their credit wordiness. And what basically they're doing is they're focusing on to scale up and replicate what is working for us and in those parts of the world they're helping. But also to tell them, please discontinue or change what is not working, stop this, innovate what needs to be improved. And then, of course, there's the question of funding. There is a second theme coming out of this debate, we need the money. Now, one of the things we are doing and many other countries are doing is that our public climate financing towards developing countries already goes into adaptation, most of it, more than half, or about half of our funding in that area goes to adaptation. This is something we as governments can work on to ask others to do more of. But this brings me to a third issue which has to do with the sort of framework. And Jutram, and you were chairing, co-chairing, I believe, and that's very important, this global commission on the economics of water. And I believe that will also be a mobilizing force to get all the information on the table, including, and this was an old initiative years ago, the Valuing Water Initiative. But we have to feed this into, I think, also if that was the idea, I thought it was the idea to do, into this commission to make sure that we have that data on the table. And then if we can bring that together, and indeed have businesses and governments and NGOs sitting there in March next year, but in the run-up to that moment, bring to the table all these practical initiatives and show us what can be done. And at the end of the day, the test is whether in your villages you are mentioning the two examples in your first intervention this morning, whether it is an answer to that, the stream of plastics, the access to water, because that at the end of the day is the test. Of course, there are many other issues. I mean, you mentioned that in the Netherlands we have too much water, but these days we have not enough. There is a drought issue now. It was there in 2020. It is again, we have a huge drought issue in the Netherlands this year. We have never experienced this. So we have too much or not enough. Almost never there is just enough. Okay, but we are a rich country and we can deal with this. But still, this means that every part of the world has its own challenges and problems. But of course, at the ultimate test is whether it helps us in the fight against climate change and it helps us in improving lives in these local communities. That is the crucial question. And I agree with Elizabeth. It is about the human focus. There is always the risk that we have these high-level debates and we produce reports, et cetera. But at the end, one drop of water lands somewhere in Kenya. No, it has to be a stream of water landing in Kenya. So, Elizabeth, you have got a global audience here, not just on the stage and in the audience, but through live stream. We are not living up to the commitments we have made. And you are seeing that on a day-to-day basis. What would you want to push all of us to do in addition or maybe doubling down on some of the ideas you have already heard presented on the stage? I think one of the main things that I would push everyone to do is actually do more and remind ourselves that we are still not doing what SANS tells us that we must do to get to where we need to get and to meet our targets. And again, we are not going to also meet our climate targets without nature as well. So we have to make sure that all these issues are not being solved in silos. These issues are all connected. And so we cannot have issues whose drivers are similar, but our solutions are everywhere. So we have to solve these issues together. We have to make sure that we are actually not solving them in silos. And most importantly, we have to move with urgency because this is about people whose lives and livelihoods are affected by every delay in action. So we cannot still continue to delay action if we really care about the people who are on the front line. And most importantly, we have to keep reminding ourselves about the stories of people whose lives depend on the decisions that we are making every day. And I think what is most important is that we actually be selfless because everything that we do today is about every person who is impacted in another part of the world. And just because these impacts are not happening where you are, it doesn't mean that they are not happening at all. They are people who actually have stories to tell about how they are being impacted. And so we cannot close our hearts and our minds into these issues. They have to be at the center of every decision that we are making. But most importantly, we have to deliver our pledges and our commitments because we cannot continue to be at the same place every now and then. And it's important that we do this for these communities. It is important that we do this for humanity. And again, when it comes to nature, this is our life support system. And if we are destroying our own life support system, then we are not being justice to ourselves and we are not being justice to the next generation that is going to inherit this planet. So it would be great if we actually leave this place better than we found it. We have to keep reminding ourselves each and every day because it's about generations to come. It's about people whose lives right now depend on it. And we will not have this freshwater future if the wild today is not liveable. So we have to start today and right now. One practical solution is you need to bring Elizabeth with you whenever you're talking about this issue over the next year. This is very powerful. And it is very inspiring. It also inspires me to do even more. And you are so right. It is through the silos, across sectors. And I think that it also has to do with how can we scale and replicate. So when we have examples of what is working, how can we make sure that they are scalable in other parts of Africa, Asia or Europe or whatever, and also how to replicate them? And if it is not possible and it is just working at one village in Kenya, it's also fine because you want to deal with the issues there. But if we can scale them and replicate them, that is also helpful. And somehow package them in a way that others can quite easily access that information and do the same. And therefore, again, as I think comes out of this discussion, this is about confidence. This is about money, but it's also about this framework. By the way, the web plays an important role here. The fact that we sit here together, but also that in the coming month, the web will try to bring together these various tracks, which are sometimes working a bit siloed at the moment, separate from each other, but to bring them together will be very important. In a sense, it's also the web 2.0 being also very active in between the meetings. I don't know about you, Prime Minister, but I was listening with admiration when the senior minister was talking about how in government the reports that cut across that every ministry has been given accountability, which is what our colleagues were talking about in the private sector, the measurements, the accountability. How did that initiative get started? What advice would you have for the people listening from the government sector as to how they can replicate that level of accountability? I suppose countries like Singapore and the Netherlands started this early because we were vulnerable. We were water vulnerable. The world is now water vulnerable. And it means starting with, it's not just about what each ministry or department does or what each segment of society does. We've got to accept that water, like carbon, has to be priced. And that's not about efficiency at the end of the day. It's about equity and sustainability. Elizabeth talked about selflessness. We need both that selflessness and the realization that it's in our self-interest to be selfless. Because what the draught in the Netherlands Prime Minister Rotte spoke about wasn't because of some misdoings by the local community in that area. We are all affected by what happens in every part of the world. That's why the climate crisis and the water crisis are about the global commons. What each of us do contributes to the problem somewhere else in the world. We spoke about the fact that irrigation practices, they need to be completely redone so as to use less water and to have less pollution in the runoff. But think about what all of us as consumers do. A large part of the water consumed in North America, let's say, in advanced group of societies goes towards producing grain for cattle, for livestock. A very large part. So the same questions we ask ourselves on climate, how much beef should we be consuming. Are the same questions that we have to ask for water. And there is an intersection of solutions that addresses both climate and water rather than pitches climate against water that we've got to focus on. You spoke about lithium, you can say the same about copper by the way. Very water intensive products. And if we think of climate by itself, we can solve the problem with the right will, with the right resources, with the right pricing. But we might be creating an even larger problem on water. So we've got to think of them together and find solutions that basically solve both of them together. But being selfless and being self-interested is the same thing when it comes to the global commons. Can I just emphasize one thing, what Singapore is doing extremely well, which is rigor. And rigor doesn't cost money. It doesn't cost one dollar to have the Prime Minister ask every man of the cabinet to have your retro report and what do we learn from this. And we are not doing this in the Netherlands to that extent. So I'm learning from this example, I think we should do that better. Because also we all have these reports, but we are not discussing them at that level of detail. This doesn't cost you one cent. It's just a question of focus, of rigor, and that's something we can learn from Singapore. And I just wanted to mention later today, there is the champion of water community also coming together here at the Web. Liesje Schreinemacher, our Minister for Foreign Aid and Foreign Trade, will be there also to collect initiatives. So I think this is not the final say today, but just the start of a whole day of water debate. So the challenge is pricing in this externality. It's the selflessness and the self-interest. And both of you touched on the market, market initiatives, a measure. How do we start to attack the problem of pricing water appropriately for its usage? Any ideas? That's clearly in the government's bucket, I think, going forward. And I think the challenge is not to price water because actually in most places there is a price for water if you're an industrial user. The question is how can we give it value for the vast number of users, recognising that most of them are on a few dollars a day income. And so charging them for water is going to be catastrophic. But then we need to find a mechanism that encourages them and provides them new methods of irrigation first and foremost that allows them to use a lot less water. And then if they don't, there's some price to not using more water. So it is a micro level problem. And maybe there are mechanisms in that micro finance sector where you can give credits first to use a certain amount of water, give credits to have investments in simple things, drip irrigation. And yet if they use more water, then they don't get a credit for it. So then they have to start paying for it. There might be solutions in there, but it's not sexy like going to Mars. It's actually very straightforward stuff, millions, if not billions of times. Paul, the tricky cold call question, how do we do this? Anything to add? Well, I think it will be important and putting a pricing on water. But I think in different parts of the world, you are in different situations. And just kind of adding one business model into that, I think is very difficult. But I focused pricing on water or a tax or whatever it is. If you don't live up to it, like we have a green tax now established in Denmark also, slowly getting some of these mechanisms there in place I think is important. But I think you got to add it or scale it depending on the situation and the maturity that you are in as a country. But overall, I think that's also a great point to add into the overall UN conference coming up. Prime Minister, I mean you said yourself that Netherlands is dealing with droughts and floods. Would you imagine my country dealing with droughts? Second time in two years. But you can afford it. You can afford to solve it. Exactly. And that's different from Kenya and so many other countries. And that's why we need to work on it, to get this done. And I'm famous like what James was saying about the very practical aspects of valuing water. I'm not an expert on this, but it is clearly a separate work stream we have to work on. And a lot of work has been done already. And I hope the Commission could also take this further, also in a run-up to the UN water conference. But it will help us to create that conference into an event which is as practical as possible. And actionable as possible, and also in a run-up that we don't wait for New York 2023. But in a run-up, things start to happen and start to be replicated and scaled. That's what we need to achieve. And that's what we are doing at the moment with so many organizations. So it's not just starting now. But this is an event to at least give extra impetus to the event. So Elizabeth, to make this credible, what would you want to see on the ground? As you look out your window with the communities you work with, what would tell you that we were moving beyond empty pledges and into real action? From what I'm hearing, we're definitely in the same storm. That's the climate crisis, the water crisis, nature crisis. But we are not in the same boat. And by not being in the same boat, there are people that definitely have the least capacity to adapt to this crisis and the least amount of resources to deal with the crisis as well. And some of these impacts right now are actually beyond human adaptation because there are certain things that humanity can actually not adapt to. And that also calls for the urgency. And I think for me, this kind of fresh water future is going to be determined by the things that begin to change today. But the fact that women will not have to work for long distances and miles to look for water and food for their families. The fact that they will not have to dig hand dug wells that are not even safe for consumption to give water to their children. And the fact that children will have food and water, people will be able to live in a community where they don't have to actually have conflicts of resources because we will teach ourselves how to actually give back more to the earth's ecosystems than we take. And this is going to be a kind of a future where we do not have the rising inequalities, a future where the climate change impacts don't have to actually be impacting people who have even least contributed. And this is only going to be made possible if we deliver and allow ourselves to also be held accountable because then this is about the actions we are taking today, the decisions we are taking today and how we are actually choosing to respond to this crisis. And all these things are going to be realized, it's possible. And this is the kind of future I envision. This is the kind of world I want to see. But this world is not going to be possible for me. It's not going to be possible for every child out there if we don't begin to do things right now because we cannot promise a future and assume that people will get that to that future if the world today has certain things that make it not liveable. So we have to begin turning things around right now to give that kind of future to me, to the children and the next generations that are to come. Yes. Elizabeth here is talking about maybe just a concrete example that is also scalable. So last year we contributed with a clean drinking water for 1.6 million people, many of them in Africa. And next year it's going to be 2 million, that would make me really proud. And then in 2030, 300 million people that do not have access today will get access to clean drinking water. This is by sustainable solar pumping solutions. And it's not just about the product, it's actually about the business model. It's about the local education on people on the ground so they can actually maintain, understand but also learn about the precious value that water actually is on the ground and then they can actually start this from an introsustainable future for society. How does that work? Absolutely, we can take into the technical details. No, not technical, but practical. A pump is actually a groundwater pump into the ground. It is run by solar cells, the water pumps up and it's actually cleaned by a cleaning unit. So there's a standalone local installation. A standalone unit and there's actually a little kiosk system where people can actually go and get acquainted and actually pay for water, buy water, but it's kept locally in the community. It's a fantastic little system. We have actually worked with Coca-Cola on that in a couple of places as well. So we are, and anybody can join in on that great approach. We would love to welcome people. And how do they do that? Local NGOs are helping us on the ground. How do they join in? What's the context? Please contact me, contact Grundfos. Absolutely, we'd love to join in. Thank you. We hear those initiatives and I heard about it, but not as eloquently as you just here put it. It might be solvable. And it's also affordable. It's good solutions, absolutely. So other practical solutions. I mean, Paul, this isn't really inspiring at the end of a rather depressing discussion of the current situation. Other things that you've seen in your global travels, Paul, James, senior minister that we'd want to bring in here, or Elizabeth, that you've seen some positive signs on the ground. The good thing, by the way, is that far more so than in addressing the climate crisis, where some of the technologies required carbon capture, green hydrogen and so on are still being developed. In water, the technologies exist by and large. They have to be made affordable and you make it affordable by adapting the technologies, so they're suitable for every village in every country, but you also make it affordable through scale. And we need to scale this up. It requires some finance, but the finance will come if, in fact, the technologies are working to deliver value and value is not just the commercial value, it's how it's changing people's lives. I mean, what Elizabeth said about women having to look for water, 40% of the time of women in rural Africa is spent daily, 40% of the day is spent looking for firewood and water. So it's a life-transformer, and if they save that 40% of the time, imagine what else they'll be able to do. If I can add one other example, which is a totally different issue around water, which is when you have too much, and of course in the past you will build dykes, and they are ugly, they're concrete. What we have developed with countries like Bangladesh, Indonesia and others is the concept of building with nature, that you have some small interventions, for example, building a small island or some other sort of artificially created island or whatever, which is then re-rooting the flow of water. And by doing that is bringing down the risks of flooding in a way that you are not impacting on the environment because these dykes can have a huge impact on the environment and also on ecological systems. So also here, the technology is there and it's sometimes even cheaper to do it in that way than to build these concrete dykes and you have all these houses disappearing behind the dykes. One of the most unique things about the frontline communities is the fact that most of these communities have also chosen not to actually be victims and they're also working on solutions on the ground to try and deal with some of these impacts and I see a lot of resilience with how they're trying to do certain things and what excites me the most is the fact that some of these solutions are actually greatly inspired by the late Professor Angare Mathai who has also greatly inspired the work that I do each and every day and for her she started by working with women because she discovered that by working with women and by helping women plant trees around their communities and their farms they would be able to get food, to get water and to also get firewood to sustain their everyday lives and I've also seen so many youth groups trying to even clean up streams around them by planting bamboo trees along the riparian and this is because for some of these places the pollution levels of this rivers is actually making it an inhabitable for people that live around there because this is the water they want to drink but then it's flowing with plastic waste it's also very unsafe to drink it's not safe for consumption so they cannot still continue to watch as the streams flow this way so they step up and choose to do it by themselves even though they are not the cause of it all so seeing these initiatives coming up with youth groups and women especially should sound a message to us that the frontline communities are not just sitting back and choosing to be victims they're stepping up and what we can do is to actually also make sure that our investment choices go into these frontline communities because most of these solutions are struggling to scale up they do not have the much needed resources as well and the much needed capacity to scale up and make them much more impactful so we cannot be talking about reinventing new solutions when there are already solutions that people work on every other day how can we actually scale them up and how can we make sure that they are replicated elsewhere each and every day because these are the people these are the stories that we need to be talking about these are the people that we need to actually be bringing on the frontline and also they are the ones that are trying to turn things around because they have seen that these impacts are only going to make things worse and instead of waiting for people that have much bigger capacity and much more resources they've chosen to step up as well and also one of the things that has that continue to make me really talk about what the future looks like is working with children because this is a generation that is going to be greatly impacted by the consequences of climate change and if anything it's the young people and children of today that are going to have to live longer with the consequences of the world's inaction and the consequences of every decision that is made today so by working with these children and I'll just give a practical example of a time that I worked with children to a stream nearby their school that was again polluted and flowing with plastic waste and this was to view the world in a perspective of a five-year-old, a ten-year-old and they asked me two questions when we got into this stream and one question was who did this and the second one is what can we do about it so it tells you that these people are not choosing to be victims they are determined to clean their own air, to clean their own water to grow their own food within their school compounds by even growing food trees around their schools but again we have to get behind this generation it's about every sector, it's about also seeing how much more can we do these people that's the best that they can do but I would assume for governments and a big company they can do much more than these communities can do so if we all get back together and do the best that we can do and I know the best that I can do is not the best that maybe you can do so it's about making sure that we are actually stepping up and working together and complimenting each other's work as well because while these people are trying to do certain things within their school compound I always like to give example with the children that I work with while they are planting trees within their school compound and trying to green their own school they see big businesses and corporations falling deforestation and that is undermining their efforts in their school so it's about how we compliment each other's efforts and make sure that every sector is actually doing the best that they can to turn things around because it's possible Thank you Elizabeth We can't end on a better note than that I just want to thank our guests we have the technology, we have the people to implement Paul Dwight Jensen, James Quincy, Senior Minister Tharman Prime Minister Huta, Elizabeth Watute Chair Thank you and Chair of the UN Conference Karen Harris from Bain & Company Thank you so much for joining us this morning