 On the forum session on cities and climate change, I am Gustavo Alegre, the journalist at NTN24, the international news channel, and it is a pleasure to be here today. As you may know, cities are battling climate change, pollution, and simultaneously focusing on much needed economic growth. Today, more than half the world's population is living in urban areas. So when we want to tackle climate change, undoubtedly we have to include cities. But how can cities work with nature to rebalance the dynamics and drive economic growth? Today we are going to hear some interesting voices, case studies and specific leadership examples on how cities are investing in nature to improve the lives of their citizens. So let me introduce our amazing panel today. Very briefly, we have the president of Colombia, Mr. Iván Duque, the mayor of Tirana in Albania, Arion Velia, and the head of Nature Action Agenda at the World Economic Forum, Acancha Country. So it's a pleasure for me to welcome all of you. And I'm going to start with a very simple question, very quick question to open this conversation. How do you think can cities prevent environmental crisis? The president of Colombia has the floor. Go ahead. Well, thank you so much, Gustavo, and it's a great honor for me to share this panel with such a distinguished group of guests. So let me begin by saying that climate crisis is the most challenging issue of our times. And the only way that we can tackle this situation and the only way that we can find sustainable solutions is also implementing policy at a city level. So that's why we use the term biodiverse cities, which are cities that have their policies aimed to protect biodiversity. Now the question is, what can cities do? And then that takes me to a certain group of areas. The first one is energy transition. A biodiverse city is a city that is expanding its non-conventional renewable energy sources so that it can drive in time all the emissions to zero by being carbon neutral. The second element that I want to highlight is clean mobility, which is to have a cleaner transportation system and also to promote the uses of bicycles and other sources of transportation that are more environmentally sound. The third element that I want to put into consideration is what we call the circular economy, produce conserving, conserve producing. That means that the private sector can also participate in the strategy and especially the companies and factories that are located in a certain city, they all can work for carbon neutrality and becoming nature positive. And that takes me to the fourth element, which is to plant trees to protect, to preserve. And that's why the leaders pledge for nature, the 30 by 30, which is to have 30 percent of our land be declared a protected area. I think cities, if they don't have area to be protected, they have to create an environment in which they can protect other areas around the world or around their country. But if we can do that in cities and also create the culture of planting trees so that we can expand also the capacity to capture CO2 emissions, that also makes a very important transformation. And last but not least, I think we all have to consider the reduction of our individual carbon footprint. And that's why the three Rs, reduced, reused, recycled in terms of human behavior and citizen behavior also makes a very important sense. And I think this is also aligned with the idea of waste management being able to have more recycling capacity, but also try to develop mechanisms like waste to energy. And I should also mention the way in which we use water and in which we have intensity in the usage of water also makes a very important element on what kind of biodiversity be, which is to have all these sound policies and be able to sustainably contribute to the protection of the environment. And Mr. President, Erion Velia, from the perspective of a mayor who is running today the Tirana city, how can cities prevent environmental crisis? Yeah, thank you so much. I love to hear the president of Colombia country I admire, visited several times. But as the saying goes, the buck stops with the mayor. In the end of the day, the mayor will go and plant the trees, put up the chargers for electric cars, put up the bike lanes. So we take this very seriously. I remember Lyndon Johnson when he was trying to soothe himself over the civil rights movement, you tell himself in the mirror, Mr. President, relax, because you could have been the mayor and things would have been more dramatic. Things have changed, jokes aside, but things have changed so much in the past years. I remember I've been mayor for six years and the first year we had a major flood and all the experts were saying, don't worry, Mr. Mayor, because only once in a hundred years you have this drama. And then the second year we had a major drought. It didn't rain for 182 days. And everybody said, you know, Mr. Mayor, you know, relax, only once in a hundred years do we have this drama. It won't happen again. The third year we had the worst fires we've ever had in our forestry around the urban area of the city. And again, the experts say only once in a hundred years do we have these types of fires and you're going to be fine. The fourth year we had two major earthquakes destroyed huge parts of the city and now we're a major reconstruction. And literally, you know, they counted the years. It was only once in a hundred years. And then, of course, for everybody else in my last year, it was a pandemic, which since the Spanish rule, it literally was once in a hundred years. But jokes aside, it has become now too common that every year has become so unique with things that only happen once in a hundred years, like the upcoming energy crisis. So the question is, do we give up and surrender or do we develop an agile attitude and say every crisis is an opportunity? So there's things that we can do. But when you ask the question, what is the most challenging infrastructure project for a mayor? My answer is 10 centimeters from here to here, because I think that's the infrastructure that is the most difficult to change. You know, the president and other distinguished guests, we all know how to build highways and how to build heavy infrastructure. But the 10 centimeters where our mentality resides, our passion for cars, our constant war with nature, that needs to change. And one thing we're doing in the city is we need to... Everybody was speaking about walls in the last four years. But we said, how about we speak about a green wall, a permeable wall, a wall that sounds that signs a boundary, not to keep people away, but becomes a linear part. So we started this idea about five years ago about the orbital forest. And we said, look, we could do it ourselves, but it won't change a thing. How about every kid in Tirana plants a tree for their birthday? We give them a GPS location. We provide a mini party for the family. We give them the shovels and we dig the hole. We give them a list of trees that they can plant. A kid that can plant a tree will never cut one. And we move from the metaphor of putting roots in a place to the physical activity of putting roots in the place. So we are now a quarter of a way there with 500,000 trees in a city of a million people. We need to do 2 million by 2030. And one thing that I've understood is I attended the COP meetings five or six years ago. And every year, there's been a different minister, which is fine. They take the government responsibility. But in the end, it stops with the mayor. So I think what we need to take from this COP is what is the actual duty of the mayor and how can central governments, presidents, prime ministers, empower the people who will be in the front line, who will actually implement these changes. And I think it's doable. Anyone who says poor countries can't do this, if you're Albanian, if you're Colombia, actually the developing countries sometimes have more innovation and crowdsourced with kids and some unusual advocates that otherwise rich countries only do with big contracts. Anything's on the table already. And I am sure that president of Colombia wanted to respond. But let's hear first Kancha Katri, the head of Nature Action Agenda at the World Economic Forum, particularly from the private perspective. How public-private partnerships can help, yeah, can help cities actually to prevent environmental crisis. Thank you so much. And thanks to the fellow panelists for this really important discussion that we are having. Last year, the World Economic Forum released its new Nature Economy Reports, which identified that more than half of the world's GDP is moderately or highly dependent on nature and its services. We also know that more than 40% of the GDP is coming from the built environment, which means the cities and the built environment is a very crucial ecosystem that we need to pay attention to. The second is that every week until 2030, 1.5 million people will move to the cities. So both from an economic imperative, but also from a people and equity imperative, cities and the built environment is of crucial importance for the world that we want to live in in 2030. As such, the forum has initiated a new project or work stream called Biodiverse Cities by 2030. This is, of course, championed by President Ivan Duque, the president of Colombia, and Professor Klaus Schwab, who's the executive chairman of the World Economic Forum. And this initiative looks to do three things specifically. One, institute a global commission, which brings out the thought leadership. The second, make sure that this thought leadership is available for all in the form of a white paper that we intend to launch at the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos next year on January 17th. And the third is to really use our community of innovators and tech entrepreneurs through the uplink platform to crowdsource innovative ideas that look at nature and nature-based solutions for their support in fighting cities' challenges. So the biggest message I think we as the forum want to put forward is that we have traditionally always looked at business as usual with great infrastructure, with looking at engineered solution. I think the 21st century economic model demands that we start giving an equal amount of investment and attention to nature-based solutions. Thank you, Ms. Hartley. Plenty of things for our conversation. There is one word that caught my eye during Mr. Mayor's first intervention, which was the request for empowering. You said we need empowered mayors and cities in order to tackle the climate change. Mr. President, how from the level of national government can empower mayors and cities in order to do their jobs tackling climate change? And let's be honest here. Sometimes mayors and presidents belongs to different political parties. Sometimes rivalries can be an obstacle for mayor agreements. How can we balance these political differences with fighting together the challenges of climate change and particularly empowering cities? I think you raised a very interesting question, Gustavo, because basically what we have always said is that this phrase that was used by Kenichi Omai makes a very important reality today, which is to think globally, but act locally. I think we all have to think globally because what we're facing, the climate crisis is a global crisis. But the way in which we have to act is also local. So we have to be fully aligned with mayors throughout our countries. And that's why this is not ideological. This is not derived from a party. We all have to work together. We all have to identify the best way to achieve the goals that we have set. And for example, Colombia is arriving at Glasgow with very clear objectives. We have said that we're going to reduce by 51% that we're agreeing our status emissions by 2030. We've also said that we're in the road to achieve carbon neutrality in 2050. But we have also said that we want to have 30% of our land be declared a protected area before 2030, but we are going to achieve that before the end of my administration. So we have to think on this big goal, but we have to work with the mayors because the mayors are the ones who can be very instrumental in triggering the usage of sustainable transportation. You can have all the best policies you want in terms of recycling, but the mayors are the ones who have the waste management responsibilities at the local level. So we have to empower them and support them. The third element is that we joined, for example, the one trillion trees initiative at the World Economic Forum, and we set the goal to plant 180 million trees by August 2022. And we're going to reach 120 million trees being planted in Colombia by the end of this year. But who are the best partners? The mayors, locally, because they have to call people to action and they can also motivate the private sector. And definitely when we talk about the circular economy that is related to the uses of water, the uses of energy, the way in which we manage the recycling policies and in the way that we get to motivate citizens, it's also very important. And that's why I was so amazed by the great, the way things that were said by the mayor and the things that he is doing with the linear park or the things that he is doing to promote the planting of trees since the citizens are youngsters or kids and that they can use geolocation technologies so they know where they have to go and plant their trees. Those are the kinds of partnerships that we're building. And that's why I decided two years ago to call up my good friend, Klaus Schwab and say, Klaus, why don't we work on this strategy and let's call this bio-diverse cities. It's to call the cities to be able to be leaders on all the biodiversity policies. So I'm glad that we're having this conversation. I'm glad to hear statements of such an importance as the ones that have been said by the mayor, but also, and Geshe has said something very important. It's the role of the private sector. This is not unique for the public sector. We have to work closely with the private sector. We need to have companies that are fully aligned with a recovery neutrality and who are fully aligned with the protection of biodiversity as a moral responsibility that we have in the 21st century. Well, and at this start, first question of Mr. Mayor, you requested power, being empowered by our global national governments. Is that easy, requesting and getting it? No, as you said, there's always tension. I happen to be on the lucky side because the current prime minister, other than being a friend, it was also the former mayor. So, having gone through that experience, but internationally, this has become very challenging. I get requests for seminars and conferences and we're all becoming seminar conference veterans on the climate issue. I never get anyone to say, look, can we help you with a few trees? There's a few institutions out there like the EBRD with a green city action plan, working with developing cities, developing countries and the capitals. In Europe, the case for Albania or Georgia or Armenia, between a third and half of the people live in the capital. So you can actually impact any policy just by working with one city alone. You know, Bogota with 10 million and Medellin with 3 million and Colombia being a huge country, you need to involve way too many mayors. And I think the task for the president is huge. But in small countries, one city is in charge of, like in our case, 50% of the GDP, but also 70% of pollution, but also the greenhouse gases and traffic. So I think, you know, governing Colombia is like 18 wheeler, it takes slow turns, but it's a huge place. But I think in places like Albania and Georgia and the Caucasus and Eastern Europe, it's like riding a bike, you know, you make some quick turns in the right direction and you need some empowerment. And I think one of my turnoffs about a lot of these international events is that we are instigating the constant talking and the very little action from either the IFIs or the private sector. So I welcome what I heard from our colleague that the private sector needs to understand that profit alone cannot be the basis of your balance sheet because eventually you are gonna go into problems, you are gonna face the energy crisis. During the pandemic, you know, a lot of businesses that were not prepared for this type of change, they were not agile, they fell flat on their face. And unless we understand that we're in this together, you know, private sector, central government, local government, at the moment we get this point, then we understand that we need to all help each other. And I love what I heard from the president about the tree initiative. And maybe it's high time that we ask all of our central governments to sort of say, let's put a quota and divide it where everybody knows their piece of the puzzle, their task, because it's the only way we move forward. But again, I insist we need to change mentality. Some of the innovation is not actually coming from the West, you know, the bus rapid transit is coming from Bogota, it's not coming from New York or London. And I think we don't need to reinvent hot water. I mean, there's so much out there in the developing world with fewer resources, but higher creativity that can be implemented. And I think this is where we need concrete action from the IFIs and also the corporate social responsibility of the private sector to go from cultivating a culture of conference and seminar veterans to cultivating actual solutions in the streets. Voices from President Duque and the major of Serena are public voices. How private sector can not only lubricate but accelerate solutions in the public sector in order to tackle climate change? Thank you for that question and also just the enthusiasm from the fellow panelists. And I couldn't agree more that nature, which is a public good, should not only be a priority for investment and attention for the public sector, it also is a priority for the private sector because this is the infrastructure that underpins all our activities. According to our research, a nature positive pathway in the urban and built environment space can unlock three trillion US dollars of business opportunities and create about a hundred million jobs. So the size of the price has been established. I think what we need to move towards is to see how can we create enabling environment and the correct public-private partnership to actually make things happen as the mayor of Tirana was suggesting. Couple of things that come to mind is absolutely looking at the international financial institutions, multilateral development banks and then the private capital is can we look at nature as an asset class? How do we make the case for investing in nature-based solutions to fight cities' challenges instead of always going for great infrastructure? Just maybe a couple of examples. I know we've talked a lot about the tree planting initiative which absolutely helps with things like lowering down temperature in urban areas, pollution, et cetera. But then there are also hard infrastructure pieces like disaster risk management or if you think about flood protection. And there have been numerous case studies which show actually investing in nature and nature-based solutions is not only good for the bottom line but it also has multiple co-benefits. So the question is how do we scale it and how do we make it mainstream? And the only way it can be done is if we have the public sector underwriting the risk and providing that initial capital which can then be used as leverage by the private sector to come on top of it. So it needs to be looked of course at a systems level but it also needs to be looked at like a case-by-case or a mechanism level but I do sincerely believe to what both the president as well as the mayor of Tehran has said is that the case exists. What we now need to move to very quickly is to making it happen. We're running out of time. I have a very specific question regarding to the current times which is the pandemic and how pandemic has hit our economies. Obviously the strong of this pandemic changes priorities in governments. So I would like to hear briefly a couple of minutes for each one from the mayor and the president. I'm gonna start with the mayor. How pandemic has changed the priorities of your government in order to tackle climate change and balance responding to the society needs during these tough times of the pandemic months. Well, you know, here in Tehran, Albania we had what they call a double slammer. So right before the pandemic we had two major earthquake September and November in 2019 and then the pandemic hit. But you know, the Chinese word for disaster it has two strokes. One stroke says danger, which it surely is. But the other stroke means opportunity. So we said, you know, what an opportunity to build now two eco-friendly brand new neighborhoods to house the people that lost their homes in the earthquake. In the meantime, we're paying their rent bonus that they're not refugees in their own city. And as we build this beautiful neighborhood according to the 10 or 15 minute city where everything is in a walking distance you don't need to grab a car to grab coffee or to go to the pharmacy or to take your kids to kindergarten. And the same thing with the pandemic. Now we're under massive vaccination but quite frankly, we know how to deal with earthquakes and the pandemic now. We don't know how to deal with another pandemic which is the pandemic of fake news and ignorance and blatant idiocy out there. There's no vaccine for that. And I think it doesn't matter whether you're is excellent to the president or you're the mayor you're from a private sector. We all need to be united front for a pandemic that I think is causing more harm than things that we know how to do. We know how to build new apartments and homes. We don't know how to beat ignorance. You know, this would be the equivalent and you guys in the media my friend also have a role. I get approached by the media who in our current context would say, well, Mr. Mayor will have you in the show for this event in Glasgow, but we will also have someone else who says this event is in Tokyo. I mean, that we cannot have a conversation like this. This is not two different opinions. This is two different facts. The COP is in Glasgow, it's not in Tokyo. It was the Olympics in Tokyo. And for people who said, well, this is just my freedom to say the most dumbest of things and like forest dump, Sikh followers, you know, leading them to nowhere. This is something we need to unite forces. Politicians, business media, we cannot have the loud minorities of the periphery dictate the agenda. Umberto Eco used to say in the old day in the villages, there was also the idiot of the village who wanted to join the conversation but because everyone knew he was the idiot, they wouldn't allow him to sit in the cafe by the church in the plaza. But now the idiot has Facebook and he writes the most outrageous things about 5G and vaccines and whatnot. And the idiot not only dictates, not only sits on the table, he dictates the conversation. And for that, I think this type of disaster which is disbalancing all of the things that we knew, you know, I grew up in communism. I was the last generation to grow up in communism. During those times, we had less information but we knew more. We knew how to take those two drops so that we could eradicate the polio. Now we live in democracy that we have taken to the extreme because we have a lot of information but we know less, less of science, less of truth. And I think we need to prepare also for a big battle on that just like we did a battle with the pandemic and other disasters. Mr. Mayor, I think you wrote a very interesting conversation but maybe it's a topic for another panel but I have good news for you. For the pandemic of fake news, we have a vaccine with double shots. The first one is education and the second one is more and better journalism. But let's skip this for another panel. Mr. President, your opinion about this question. Go ahead. First of all, I want to say that I also want to be in that panel because I have enjoyed a lot of what the president has said. And yes, I think we live in a time where we see also the pandemic of fake news and we have to govern with those very complex situations. But something that you said when you asked a question about financing and making this happen and whether it has derailed maybe some of the policies that we had, I just want to say that facts as the mayor was saying show us that for example in Colombia, the year of the most rapid expansion of renewable energies was 2020. So it was in the midst of the pandemic that make this massive mobilization of clean energy. The second thing is the best year ever in electric vehicle sales was 2020. So this also happened in the midst of the pandemic. Obviously this year we're growing even more. But seeing that in 2020 was amazing. And also something that I want to highlight is green financing because we need to be able to connect the resources that are available in the markets with the goals that we're set to achieve. And something that I feel very proud of is that to one week ago we launched the first green bond in Colombia in local currency. So we launched the bond and we were able to have seven times the demand of the placed order. So that's why we had to even increase the emission by 50%. And 50% of the buyers of those bonds were international buyers. And they also got what we call a greenium which is a premium based on how green the policies that you're financing with the bond are. So this demonstrates that intelligent green financing are also very important to help our economies to find resources because as the mayor also knows we're now in this moment also having the conflict of what penny goes to education, to health infrastructure and what penny also goes to climate action. So if we also have private sector smart financing through bonds and other mechanisms, we're also going to allow that there's more resources available so that there's no conflict between what goes to climate action and what goes to other purposes. So I believe that that was thought this discussion is very important. And that's why we have also make a big claim that for example with the IMF for a period of time money that is devoted as investment for climate action should not be considered on the basis line of the fiscal deficit so that we can accelerate rich in carbon neutrality and not having the conflict of each penny going to other purposes. So I believe this has to be put on the table and I look forward for the conversation that we will have in Davos so that this debate about biodiversity and also how do we finance the climate action is also sustained and based on the cornerstone of green smart financing. We run out of time. I have only one minute. So I need your commitment for a very short answer for this simple question. Give me one example of what has worked and what has not when we talk about cities and tackling climate change and I'm going to start with Akansha later the mayor and we're going to finalize with the president. So Akansha. Okay. So since I have to set the bar high in terms of respecting the time I think one thing frankly which has worked very well and picking up on the point everybody was talking about pandemic is the level of awareness. I think globally today the level of awareness in cities for a nature positive and a nature compatible living is very, very high which gives merit to political leaders to take action. What hasn't worked I would say what hasn't worked as fast as the urgency of the challenge is is that move towards a nature positive pathway particularly in the biggest shift of as the president was saying earlier both in terms of utilities, transport and then the local spaces. Thank you. Well, you know, for thousands of years that humanity has been around we have been walking and running that's our natural state of being fish are swimming and birds are flying and humans walk and run. Only for the last 100 years we've developed this habit of sitting in a metal box called the automobile, three tons of metal. So during the pandemic what worked very well is many cities and I'm not only speaking of my city but a lot of the networks that we're part of went on this constant spree to get bike lanes to get more open spaces to get car free zones in the city. And what hasn't worked in some cases is cities falling back to this habit and I love what I've learned in my trips to Columbia. What many of the mayors say, you say, look, it's about ambition. Is your ambition that every poor person eventually gets rich enough to get a car or is it your ambition that every rich person eventually gets to use public transport and walk more and bike more. And I think we need to make sure that the lessons we learn during the pandemic stay for the long term and we don't fall back doing the same usual stuff to get the same usual results. Mr. President. Well, I'd say what's working is cases like the mayor. They're seeing mayors around the world doing great things that's very motivating. And what's been working is also the transition in energy. What's working is clean mobility. What is working is circular economy. Still there are a lot of things to achieve but I think that the biggest challenge that we face and that's something that I, I don't want to see it with pessimism. I just want to see it with optimism and try to connect the people with technology is we need to do something more positively aggressive so that every individual can make its own goals to reduce their own carbon footprint. So how much we recycle at home, how much intensity do we have in the ways we use energy? How much transportation do we use? How many trees do we plant? Those kinds of elements I think are also very important and I look forward to having a society where we have the big goals by the government, the big goals by the mayors, the big goals by the private sector but also the big goals by individuals having the possibility to reduce and monitor on a permanent basis with AI, IoT, the way in which they reduce their own carbon footprint. And I think this is part of the ethics of the 21st century. We have only one planet and the future of this planet is in our hands, the hands of presidents, mayors, private sector and every one of us. Thank you, President of Colombia, Mayor of Tirana and the World Economic Forum for your leadership and for sharing with us today these amazing initiatives. I wish you the best luck for all of us. Thank you, the World Economic Forum Thank you, it's ours. for this panel. Thank you.