 Kieran and I have been talking a lot about the green economy and climate change, but also where it comes from from a historical context and trying to enrich our current discussions with what we can learn from those. And we thought that we'd share a little bit of that discussion with you. Thanks, Kieran. Thanks, Jacob. It's been really fun to talk about where this idea of sustainable development comes from and what is its current resonance so as folks meet next week in New York, we thought it would be fun to share some of the ideas that we've been batting around about why it's important to look at or to think about when these discussions happened before and what was the nature of those. One of the things that you often like to remind me about is that we've been here before. There's a historical context against which we need to think about these things. As we're caught up in the very current policy debates and jargon, it's very easy to forget about this historical context. So as both of us were talking about what's going to happen next week in New York about the development dialogue, the CGIAR development dialogue and the focus on climate change and sustainable development, and I was reminded of the first time I thought about the issues of sustainable development as a student in the 1980s, but as I was reading about sustainable development, I read that the idea about the linkages between economy and ecology or economy and the environment appeared in the 1970s. The first UN conference in 1972 on the human environment was focusing on how environmental issues emerged sort of as a response, not as a response, but that emerged out of the cause by pollution. There were sort of the effects or the after effects of economic growth. So the early discussions about environment and development were ones in which the sort of, in school we used to call them so-called brown issues because they dealt with issues of pollution. By the 1980s, the idea of environmental issues being an externality of economic development were beginning to change and people began to talk about how economic growth and economic development and environmental conservation were not necessarily oppositional, but linked to each other, that one needed the environment for economic growth. So that environmental issues and economic growth issues were not incompatible, but were indeed linked. And indeed the discussions about tropical conservation and biodiversity began appearing on the global agenda in the 1980s as scientists began discussing the importance of the tropics, especially the tropics, because a large percentage of the diversity of life in the world is located in the tropics. So issues of global warming, deforestation appeared in the agenda in the 1980s. And one of the most interesting and important formulations of economic growth and environmental conservation appears in the Bruntlin Commission, what's called the Bruntlin Commission, the WCED report that occurred in 1987 that argued that environmental conservation was necessary to promote, that we needed economic growth. We needed sustainable development, which meant that it was economic growth that met the needs of the present generation without compromising the needs of the future generation. So in essence, the idea that sustainable development was development that was attentive to environmental issues, attentive to social needs, through economic growth. But of course, we've now seen that taken a step further with our contemporary discussions of climate change and now increasingly this idea of green economy. Right. And I see the green economy as being, in many ways, it certainly is different from the earlier discussions of sustainable development. And we can come back to that idea. But what struck me about these discussions about green economy and how it's related to the previous discussion about sustainable development is that the earlier definition implied or had the belief that there were no trade-offs or that there needed to be, that there were no trade-offs between economic growth and environmental conservation. And the current debates about green economy also are positing that idea that there are no trade-offs between environment and economy for the social good. And that made me think about your work and the kind of ideas that you've been talking about, that it's a little bit perhaps short-sighted or naive to say that there are no trade-offs, right, that one of the arguments that you made in your work that I find compelling is that indeed there are trade-offs. That's right. I mean, as in these previous formulations that you've just been talking about and in the green economy, there can be little doubt that there are important links between economy and environment. But simply because there are those links and simply because the policy instruments that we used to try and address them oftentimes try and do them in tandem, that does not mean that there are no trade-offs. And so I think it's important to disentangle that. The intricate relationships between them and our need to try and address them in a simultaneous way doesn't mean that we can achieve everything always at the same time. And I think that that particularly in the context of green economy and climate change brings us quickly to discussion about natural capital valuation because that is often posited as one of the tools through which we're going to be able to either match up our environmental and economic objectives or reconcile those trade-offs. And this is an issue that I struggle with immensely because in some respects it's very logical, but it's also very problematic as we've been discussing. It is logical in the sense that taking the accounting for the cost, accounting for environmental cost, accounting for, let's say, future value as well as costs of pollutions, taking that into account is one of the fundamental and logical premises of the green economy. The debates, as you and I have been having for a while, are related to who bears the cost, are the costs born equally, is the economy the best instrument through which these costs should be distributed, should the state play a role, who gets to have a say in how these costs are going to be determined. So the idea of the green economy again, and these are one of the many discussions that you and I have been having and I hope they'll continue, is what is green about the green economy? Is it talking about trees? Is it about the environment? Is it about the economy? And of course, colloquially, it's about both. But is it one at the cost of the other? Or is it that you need one for the other? And then again, are these costs, or is this growth equitable? Where is the issue of equity? This is, again, one of the issues we talked about last week at the annual meeting, right, about the mandates of development, the CGIA, mandates of development, development related to economic growth. But where is the issue of equity? And those, I think, are discussions that very much need to be had by scientists who are talking about the issue of the role of forests in mitigating climate change in leading up to sustainable development. That's right. So not only, so to a certain extent, there's a need for semantic clarity and conceptual clarity. But I would go a step further that once we have that, we also need to think about, well, if there are going to be trade-offs and trade-offs that we understand, perhaps in terms of natural capital valuations, one of the tools through which we try and understand that, who is going to help us navigate those? And of course, as you mentioned, equity is instrumental within our concerns of how those are navigated. And it really brings us to an issue that I'm very concerned with in terms of the green economy, which is the role of the state. If we decide that natural capital is a helpful concept that's going to allow the private sector to internalize environmental costs and that that's going to lead us to some sort of a solution, how is this internalization going to occur? We've seen with carbon markets that voluntary internalization, while it happens, is by no means of a scale that's going to address the challenges at hand in terms of financing or in terms of participation. And similarly, if we expect the state to step in, then we need, in terms of saying to the private sector, we expect a sort of accounting. We also have seen reluctance there. We've also seen great leadership. And in the context of this New York meeting, I think that that really is something that we need to contend with is a very high expectation that is political will that perhaps makes natural capital a viable concept. This isn't an accounting question. This isn't a voluntary compliance question. This is really an issue of, well, if we think the solutions lie in there, maybe they do, maybe they don't. We need political will and governance institutions behind them to ensure that there's going to be uptake. And not just simply reliance on voluntary participation. Yeah, I agree entirely. And again, this is why I think that we should, and we will certainly continue having discussions about what do we mean by the green economy? How is it going to be implemented? Is this at the meeting next week and the meetings that are going to follow for the 2015 Sustainable Development Debates, the meeting in Lima at the COP, part of it is, again, it's governments and states discussing these issues and thought about as a policy issue, right? Is this a policy issue? What kind of policies can be put into place to be able to deal with this accounting? Others argue that this is very much a political issue. And to be able to come up with a good accounting, it's going to require a different kind of negotiation and a stickier, perhaps some more contentious negotiation. And again, this is a field in which scientists are beginning to participate. But as you invoked history, I would say, again, that as scientists engage in these debates, it might be useful to take a look at the historical precedents, at the historical debates, how did they play out, what were the kind of things that were being said. What can we learn from them? I'm not sure that the learning will help us not repeat those disappointments, right? I was trying to avoid those kind of terms. But I'm not sure that they will allow us to move beyond those. Maybe they might. But again, visiting them will give us some sense of prevent us from underestimating the complexity of the challenges that we face. And perhaps broadening the discussion will mean that perhaps we can be a little bit more creative in terms of how we're going to engage it. Great. Well, thanks very much, Kiran. And thank you. This was great fun.