 Hi, my name is Davide Bollatti and I am the Chairman of Daveness Comfort Zone Group. At Daveness we are so honored to be sponsored for the first time of the World Happiness Report 2020. Our wish is that this report will not be seen just as a mere ranking of countries from top down, but instead as an inspiring learning tool for all of us to imagine and create a better version of our world, a world that we as human race inhabit and not just dispose of it. We humans should more and more inhabit this world with respect and awareness of the most varied interdependences. Whether happiness is explored and measured in the context of subjectivity or objectivity, countries or cities, people versus economy or the whole planet, the way we inhabit it as a species will become more and more crucial in the years to come for the sustainability of that same ecosystem in which we as humans are working to find the ultimate formula of happiness. Isn't it becoming clearer and clearer day after day? Thank you and best wishes to the 2020 World Happiness Report. Good morning. Let me start this brief message by thanking so much the UN SDSN team for this eighth World Happiness Report. I think that this year, more than ever, people will be conscious about the importance of this important work. As a matter of fact, in our society we were implicitly in doubt whether it was more important people or business. Now with this dramatic pandemic coronavirus, it's a very strong wake-up call, remembering us that it's all about people, people, people. So in this World Happiness Day, I would like to make a wish, first of all, to remember, to remember the importance of happiness for everybody's life, to remember how everything is interconnected, social life, health, the economy. It's like a coronavirus came to remember us that we are not God. And besides remembering, my wish is to prepare for the next time. I'm amazed about how unprepared was the society for this pandemic. We are prepared for everything, war, fires, anything except for pandemics. So I think that the UN SDSN team could do a great job in recommending a plan for after coronavirus so that even skeptical people, skeptical people thinking that happiness isn't nice to have, it is not, and prepare for enduring happiness in the decades ahead. Hi, my name is Jen Gross and I'm the co-founder of the Blue Chip Foundation, an organization that makes grants to advance the SDGs. At this moment of pandemic, health and well-being are naturally a global priority as we prepare for the worst while hoping for the best. The coronavirus unquestionably threatens to undermine two of the driving indicators of well-being that the World Happiness Report identifies, health and income. Yet the emergency measures the United States is taking to address it highlight how reactive our national approach to well-being is in contrast to how proactive it could be. I believe that the donor community must do more to ensure that we support increasingly proactive approaches to well-being. Philanthropy is already focused on key well-being pillars like health and income, but communities require more than that. They also need higher levels of equality, trust, and interpersonal support. So how do we do this? We can look to cities for guidance. Here in the greater Los Angeles area where I live, the city of Santa Monica has pioneered the well-being project. They fund initiatives addressing economic inequality and social isolation such as an early childhood development center. Philanthropy was key to making this program possible. It's impossible to speak about well-being today without acknowledging how this report can help us right now to fight back against the threat of the coronavirus. As one first step, we are making donations to organizations that support our most honorable citizens by investing in their urgent, increased, and sustained well-being. Among these is the National Domestic Workers Alliance, which supports marginalized workers that take care of our homes and our families. In addition, we will donate to the World Central Kitchen that currently serves Angelinos in need of meals. I hope everyone watching today will not only review this year's report but will also integrate its findings into the work you do to establish new standards of government of, by, and for the broader well-being of citizens. I believe doing so is the best way to rebound stronger from the current health crisis than we began it. Thank you, stay safe, and be well. Hi everyone, I'm Ian Maskell, head of Marketing at Walls, the world's largest ice cream company and proudly part of Unilever. I'm based in Rotterdam, and today I'm quarantined in Amsterdam, which is why I can't be with you in New York. It's an honor to be part of this launch event for the World Happiness Report 2020, and many thanks to Jeff and Sharon for making us feel so welcome as part of the World Happiness family at SDSM. Walls has been bringing happiness to the heart of communities for more than a hundred years, and our vision is to make the world a happier, more inclusive place one street at a time. Our partnership with the World Happiness Report marks a step up in our ambition as we launch the Walls Human Happiness Movement. Walls will be focusing on social support as a key lever to build happier communities, and we will be campaigning to put happiness first across the world. We believe that our scale brings a new dimension to the amazing work pioneered by Jeff, Richard, John, and Jan Emmanuel, and the team at the World Happiness Report. Walls serves more than 20 billion portions of happiness every year in over 150 markets, and we hope that this will be the start of a very fruitful partnership with the World Happiness Report. We wish you all the best for the launch of the 2020 report, and we hope that you can all stay safe and happy as we go through the rest of 2020. Many thanks, good luck, and goodbye. Hello everyone. Happy International Day of Happiness, and welcome to the launch of the 2020 World Happiness Report. This year's theme is Environments for Happiness. My name is Lara Acknen, and I'm an associate co-editor of the report, and I'll be your emcee today. Thank you for joining us, especially in these unprecedented times. We've altered our program to address the importance of happiness and how it will be impacted during the current pandemic. Before we begin, Ms. Cheyenne Maddox will give us some brief technical instructions for our webinar. Hi everyone. Before we get started, I'd like to give you a brief overview of how to participate in today's event. We've taken a screenshot of an example of the Intendi interface. You should see something that looks like this on your own computer desktop in the upper right corner. You're listening in using your computer speaker system by default. If you would prefer to join over the phone, just select telephone, and the audio pane, and the dial and information will be displayed. You will have the opportunity to submit text questions to today's present presenters by typing your questions into the questions pane of the control panel. You may send in your questions at any time during the presentation. We will collect these and address them during the Q&A session at the end of today's presentation. Thanks, Laura. Thanks, Cheyenne. We will now turn to Professor Jeffrey Sacks, President of the SDSN and Director of the Center for Sustainable Development to start us off. Please go ahead, Jeff. Thank you very much. Welcome, everybody. I hope everybody is staying safe and is comfortable wherever they are. It was very inspiring to hear the words of all our partners, and also to consider that in every location, we really are right now only able to interact virtually in this way. California, where Jammer's Lucha Foundation is located, announced a complete lockdown this morning. And of course, as Ian Maskell of Walls Ice Cream said, he's locked down. The UN is operating virtually at the moment without any meetings beyond very small numbers of people. We're in a completely unprecedented and dramatic time in the modern era. This is a very serious, very dire global pandemic. And we're entering a wave of accelerated harm and danger. So first, I want to bid everybody to take good care and exercise extreme caution. Well, our theme today of happiness, of course, is very complicated in the face of this pandemic. It is our source of hope and humanity. And that's why we celebrate a global day of happiness on March 20th each year, and why I'm thrilled and honored to be part of the wonderful group who are the pioneers of my co-editors. I should say, not me, who are the pioneers of this area. So we're going to hear from John Helliwell in just a moment. We'll discuss how his important work, John Helliwell, Richard Layard, Laura Acknen, Janemann Well, Dinev, can really help us in this difficult period. And also, of course, Howard can shed light on how our societies should be, as Jen Gross put it, proactively organized to be promoting happiness when we get back to more normal times. And we will. We will get through this, but we have to get through this together. And we have to get through this through decisive action. Well, let me not delay any longer. We're going to hear from John Helliwell, whose analytical work is at the very foundation of our report each year. We'll hear about the rankings. We'll hear about the determinants of well-being. And then we'll have a discussion about happiness and COVID-19, the interactions and the implications. And then we'll hear from the wonderful chapter authors who have written spectacular pieces, absolutely fascinating pieces in this year's report. So let me turn it over back to our moderator, to Lara, and then to John Helliwell. Thank you very much, Jeff. So we'll now hear from the World Happiness Report co-editors, John Helliwell, Richard Laird, Yana Manuel, Dinev and Jeff Sachs as they discuss the first two chapters of this year's report. And with special mention to COVID-19 and well-being. So please hold all questions until the end of our session. And if you do have questions, please feel free to submit them in the application. John, may you please begin. Absolutely, Lara. And my best to everyone on this call. Thanks for being with us as we organized this report. Of course, this was long before the first case of COVID-19. And so it's only chance that, in fact, our emphasis this year on the environments for happiness has taken us into areas that do speak to what we're going through now. I will start first with looking at what we often have as the headline item from the report, which is how countries around the world rank in terms of their evaluations of their lives. If you could put up the first slide, please. I'll show you the figure that's standard in our reports. And the colored bars at the left show you how much of nation's average evaluations of their lives depend on six things that we found explain more than three quarters of the differences across countries and over time in how people value their lives, their income per capita, social support, healthy life expectancy, sense of freedom to make life choices, generosity and perceptions of corruption. Now that's a limited measure for trust. All of those, of course, are threatened in times of need, but several of them come into special power at that time. And I'm going to note that the emphasis on the three environments for happiness we look at on the report are the social environments, natural environments and urban rural environments compared. And you'll hear about those later. I'm going to take you first for a moment or two into the social environments for happiness where our evidence this year, just by chance as it turns out, focuses on things that are very important in these very current times. What we looked at and found is that countries and communities where people trust each other and trust their institutions are ones where people value their lives more highly. All the top ranked countries, Finland is once again for the third year at the top of the list by an even slightly greater margin this year, but basically the countries that are in the top five this year include four people who, but four countries have been the top of the whole list. And they're all countries as indeed are all the top 10 and 20 countries where all of those six factors are in good supply. But the Nordic countries, we'll see this again in chapter seven, are unusual in a sense that they're all always in the top 10 countries and often in the top five and right at the top. And one of the things they have in those countries is quite a high degree of personal social connections and high levels of trust in their public institutions. And we found that when we then asked ourselves, one more thing before I go move to the next slide, and that is that not just our trust in others and trust in institutions important for everybody, they're especially important for people who are suffering from in current troubles. For example, people who feel they're subject to discrimination, people in ill health, people who are unemployed, people with low incomes, people who are frightened. And what we did is that of course means inequality is much less when the levels of trust are higher because the people most in trouble are most benefited by that high trust. So as an experiment after this modeling, we then said what would happen if all the people in Europe had the same trust levels as in the Nordic countries? And if we could move to the next picture, that's what we'll show you. So here, the black and white distribution is the actual levels, the fitted levels of life evaluation on a zero to 10 scale of all the individuals sampled of many hundreds of thousands all over Europe. And then in the green figures, we show in the in the darker green one, what would happen if everybody in Europe had the same levels of social trust and trust in institutions as they do in Norway and Nordic countries generally, not just Norway. And you can see immediately what happens that in fact, not only is the average higher, but the distribution is much closer. And you find those countries are in fact the ones that have not just the highest levels, but the least inequality. This does not mean in the COVID-19 terms that if you aren't in Nordic country, you're not going to do well in this. These are individuals all over the world we're looking at. We find that in every community, the capacity is there. We found it in earthquakes and tsunamis and otherwise that these tough times invite societies and individuals to work together in order to build better lives for each other. And we find the extent to which they do so not only generates more trust, but in fact, they rely very much on each other. And so you find a bit of a something extra that is often seen as a surprise by people that very difficult times sometimes bring out the best in people and often bring out the best in people. And they end up being actually pleasantly surprised at the extent to which their neighbors will pool work together with them in order to see life through a difficult period. And of course, having seen that, it's then much better going back afterwards. One more thing I should mention before I pass over to the other editors is that I think we have to think differently about the term social distancing, which has been used as part of the required response in the current circumstances. I would like to suggest that we don't need social distancing. We need social closeness with physical distancing because that's what the stake is. We have to learn how to connect with the warmth that close personal contact always does. We have to keep those connections alive and build them when we're doing the two meter hug and the electronic connection. And that's going to require a lot of innovation, but the power for that innovation lies within all of us. And I invite you to exploit it and I will now pass back to Lara. Thank you very much for that, John. We'll now hear from Professor Sacks. Jeff, over to you. Oh, Jeff, sorry to interrupt, but we cannot hear you yet. Sorry, I thought I had pressed that button. Thank you very much for the words of wisdom, John. And I'll say a few words about the epidemic itself, the economy and some of the early implications very, very quickly. We have a virus and a world population that is immunologically naive to this virus. There is no immunity from earlier waves of infection. So in principle, as far as we know, everybody is vulnerable. Of course, older people are much more vulnerable to serious illness and to death. It's estimated that 80% of the mortality occurs in people 60 and over or people with prior medical conditions. So far, the only real way to control this pandemic is what John referred to as physical distancing, and which is referred to commonly as social distancing. But it is acting to stop the transmission between people. And currently, China and other countries in East Asia are having relative success in this and the countries of Europe and North America so far very little success. But we are still, we hope, at a controllable phase of this epidemic. What has worked so far are clampdowns in China, lockdowns of society, and that method is spreading. Now, the economic ramifications are very serious and dire, of course, because this is a deliberate closure of a significant part of the economy, unprecedented in modern history. Output absolutely globally, not only will not grow, but will decline by many percent of GDP in the first half of 2020. It will be a much deeper decline than 2008, and it will create a tremendous amount of economic distress. What are the lessons for policy in this? Well, I think the only things we can say with high confidence are act to stop decisively the spread of the infection. And don't wait, don't do it too late, because once it's out of control, it's extraordinarily costly. Second, protect the vulnerable populations, especially older people, people with prior health conditions and the indigent. And third, provide social support. And this means the kind of solidarity, redistribution of income, support for the poor, not only that our partners spoke about at the top of the hour that John Helligwell emphasized as being part and parcel of the model of Finland and the other countries ranking at the height of the epidemic. Let me just say, again, we're thinking of people everywhere in Italy, very hard hit where we have our wonderful partners of Andrea Illi and Davide Bellotti and their fantastic companies. Take care. We are really in the hard phase of this. The economics are not good. We're going to have to share a very, very sharp crisis in the coming months. Let me turn it back to you. Thank you very much, Jeff. We'll now hear from Richard Laird. Richard, thank you. Thank you, Lauren. Hello, everybody. We are in a very difficult situation, but I do believe that if we handle it right, we can come out of this better than we went into it. We can come out of it with a society in which people are caring more for each other and in which they are taking better care of themselves. So let me start with the care for others. Obviously, as Jeff has said, we are going to have millions of people self-isolated, not just to protect themselves but to protect others. We're going to have lots of healthy people looking after frail and lonely people, either directly or remotely. We're going to have millions of people looking after other people's children who are not in school. And of course, we're going to have millions of health care workers risking their lives on our behalf. Now, all of these kinds of actions went on every day in the Second World War. There was an unprecedented level of fellow feeling. And what's important is that it went on for years and decades after that. So I think we can emerge from this with a society in which we are valuing cooperation a lot more strongly relative to competition. I also hope that our government will be giving a much higher priority to our personal well-being in the years to come. So let's just look at a few facts. In Europe and the USA, more people have already died from this epidemic than in the whole of East Asia, non-communist as well as communist, even though that is an area with double population and where the virus started. So what's been going on in the West? Basically, we have given priority to sustaining the GDP over the well-being of the people and that's got to change. As Thomas Jefferson said, the life and happiness of the people are actually the first and only responsibilities of the government. So let's hope that governments too, as well as our culture, will emerge with a far greater focus on people's well-being. Finally, ourselves, it will obviously require a lot of wisdom for all of us to come through this period of huge anxiety for everybody, but of course, some people will suffer a lot more, people who lose their loved ones, people who lose their jobs and don't have governments wise enough to sustain their livelihoods. We've all got to find inner resources to draw on. I personally am going to be drawing on the 10 keys to happier living that are put out by the organization called actionforhappiness, actionforhappiness.org, and these spell out the letters for great dream. So great is the five as it were fruit and veg we have to do every day to keep our spirits up, giving, relating even if remotely, exercising, appreciating what we've got and trying out new things. These are things that we can do every day and we can also think about the longer term things in the dream which is like direction. It may be a time to reappraise what really matters to us in life. So this is a very, very hard time, but I do believe it can have a silver lining. I think we can end up with a society which is more fellow feeling, more concerned for the common good, and in which people are better focused on the things that really matter to them. So let's hope that that works out well and very good luck to all of you. Thank you very much for that Richard. We'll now turn to our final co-editor of the report, Jan Emanuel. Please, Jan. Thank you Lara and I hope everyone is doing as well as he or she possibly can. I want to follow up on the wise words of Richard, John and Jeff, and note that it goes without saying that the notion of social distancing really is the wrong label from a well-being perspective and we should be practicing physical distancing while staying socially connected and this happens in fact and this is important mostly through our jobs, even if these meetings now take place mostly over Zoom or Skype. So I will speak a little bit about the relationship between well-being and work in light of the coronavirus epidemic and so while the initial focus throughout the epidemic has clearly been on understanding the health risks of the coronavirus and containing its spread, you will have noticed that attention has now squarely also turned to the economic impact and in particular how it is affecting work and the workplace. In fact, a new poll by our friends at Gallup just confirmed that already half of US workers believe that the coronavirus will have a negative effect on their workplace and I would expect this to increase much further in the coming weeks. The signs of well-being can help explain these very real worries that people have related to their jobs and perhaps even offer policy guidance on what actions could mitigate the negative impact on well-being. My work and that of many others in our field has shown over and over again just how important work is for happiness, in fact being made redundant reduces one's life satisfaction by about 20% and importantly it doesn't easily recover from this drop. Worse still actually we find there to be psychological scarring effects even after gaining re-employment. Also important to note is that the and to understand from a well-being perspective is that the loss in income from being made redundant only counts for about half of the big drop in life satisfaction. The rest is due to losing part of your identity, a routine throughout the day and especially losing part of one's social network. So these non-pecuniary drivers of workplace well-being are not typically taken into account in the policies that are now being proposed and I want to give and illustrate this with a quick example. If you look at the United States today you'll likely see that there will be about one million new unemployment claims this week alone and it's hard to put in words just how devastating the impact on well-being will be from this unprecedented tsunami of job losses. A lot of the proposals to deal with this aim mostly at replacing the lost income by for example sending out $1,000 checks to every American family and while this may be necessary it would not be sufficient to maintain levels of well-being for the reasons just highlighted because for that we really need to keep people paid and in their jobs. Economic stimulus packages that center for example on funding paid leave for a certain period to avoid redundancies will do a much better job I think at maintaining well-being levels and in fact the most radical example that's come out in recent days would be Denmark very high up in our well-being rankings needless to say where the government has just promised to cover 75 percent of salaries at private companies for three months on the condition that they do not let staff go and well-being research also provides insight into just how much people are willing to pay to deal with unemployment. Andrew Oswald and colleagues found that people are willing to trade off about 1.7 percent of inflation just to guard against the 1 percent increase in unemployment and so these job security programs to bridge this period of this epidemic can can cost something in the minds of people and may even come at the cost of some future gains in growth if need be. Indeed we found in recent work that people's well-being is twice as sensitive to downturns as compared to equivalent up swings suggesting that people are willing to ensure against downturns that threaten their jobs. I'll end but where I started by putting another plea for doing physical distancing while staying socially connected and given that this happens mostly through having a job even if online these days we really need to do everything we can to maintain people in their jobs. Over to you Lara. Thank you very much everyone for these very important and timely insights. We'll now hear from each of our chapter authors themselves to give brief overviews of the content of their report. So the first person we'll be hearing from is Christian Krekel at the London School of Economics and co-author of chapter three entitled Cities and Happiness a Global Ranking and Analysis. Over to you Christian. Thank you Lara. Perfect. Do we have the slides somewhere? Oh yeah wonderful. Okay thanks. Hello also from my side. I hope that you're all feeling well. The title of our chapter is Cities and Happiness a Global Ranking and Analysis and this is joint work with Jan-Eman Rodineva who we've just seen from the University of Oxford. Could we have the next slide please? Right so what is our chapter about? Our chapter is the first global ranking of city happiness. Why are we looking at cities in addition to countries? That's because most people today more than half of the world's population are living in urban areas. The trend is that this is going to be increased by about 1.5 times to about 6 billion or 75 percent by the middle of this century. Cities are really important. They're economic powerhouses. They allow for an efficient allocation of labor, higher productivity, hence higher incomes. So all these good agglomeration benefits but at the same time they're also of course negative externalities. There might be a lack of affordable housing, there might be a lack of green spaces, a higher densification brings with it more pollution for example. So these are all things which need to be balanced against each other and it's important to find out how city dwellers do on average in terms of their quality of life. And I think this is also very well summarized in STG11 Sustainable Cities and Communities which actually if you read it very carefully includes many, many items that are relevant for happiness. So why are we looking at happiness? That's because we argued that city dwellers themselves are the best judges of what matters to them and to their quality of life. We think that actually looking at self-reported happiness is a democratic way to look at quality of life and our rankings sense much different from other rankings of cities which look at quality of living and which are basically based on objective lists which researchers or policymakers define as under. That's the top-down approach. We essentially have a bottom-up approach. We look at self-reported happiness. How do we do this? We basically collected a nationally representative data from the Gallup World Poll and the Gallup US Poll which includes self-reported items on how city dwellers evaluate their lives. And what we do is we basically create simple mean rankings of life evaluation on a 0 to 10 scale without any manipulation of about 186 cities in more than 160 countries. Can I have the next slide please? Right. So this is basically our main result at the top. So these are the worldwide top 20 cities in terms of how people evaluate their lives. And you can see if you look at the very top, the top 10, you can see that there are many familiar faces in terms of the country rankings of happiness. So we have Helsinki in Finland ranked one, Aarhus in Denmark ranked two, and Wellington New Zealand ranked a third. So many of the cities in the top 10 are actually Scandinavian cities. And if we extend this list to the top 20, we see that there are also many cities from Australia, New Zealand, and partly North America. So pretty much our ranking, our global ranking of city happiness, corroborates our ranking of country happiness. Which delves, of course, into the question whether city happiness is essentially the same as country happiness. And that's something we can see on the next slide, where we basically tabulated country happiness versus city happiness across all countries, which is on the left. And here you can see that the red line is essentially the 45 degree line, which means equality between city happiness and country happiness. And what you can see is there's indeed a high correlation, but it's not necessarily the same. And you can see that on balance, it seems that people living in cities seem to report a higher happiness. If you look at the right graph, you can see that this becomes actually much more pronounced in low income countries. So according to the World Bank definition, here actually people living in cities report a higher happiness than people in the country on average, which seems to suggest that living in a rural area in a low income country actually is associated with lower happiness. On the next slide, we basically then look at happiness inequalities. Again, we look at the very simple measure of dispersion of happiness and equality, which is simply the standard deviation. And we basically tabulate the standard deviation at the country level in happiness with that at the city level in happiness. Again, for all countries, when you can see that happiness equality inequality is highly correlated at the country level and at the city with the city level, but it's not necessarily the same. So what can we say in our chapter? The cities that are ranking highest, and you can see this on the next slide, the cities that are ranking highest in terms of how people evaluate their lives are essentially located in Scandinavia, Australia, New Zealand, and to some extent the North Americas is quite similar to our country ranking. It should be noted, however, that there are cities in Latin America and the Caribbean where people rank themselves very high in terms of expected future life evaluation, despite the fact that their current life evaluation may not be as high. So there's a quite high optimism in cities in Latin America and the Caribbean region. That's reported in the chapter, alongside with other indicators of happiness, namely positive and negative effect. Please do check out the chapter. We also have the full 186 city ranking in the chapter. And as a final word, I'd like to say that our city ranking based on happiness partly mirrors that of other city rankings based on objective lists, but they're also clear differences. So it's important for future research to find out what these differences, why these differences exist and what is driving happiness in cities. Thank you. Thank you very much, Christian. Very interesting to see the happiness rankings by city. This is the first year I believe that's happened. So thank you very much. I'll remind you to please turn off your video. Thank you. And so now we will turn to a video prerecorded from Martin Berger at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, who is a co-author of chapter four, which is entitled Urban Rural Happiness, Differentials Across the World, providing another and extended investigation into the exploration of happiness in urban and rural areas around the globe. Thank you. Hi, my name is Martin Berger from the Erasmus Happiness Economics Research Organization. Today I'll be presenting to you the highlights of chapter four of the World Happiness Report 2020. This chapter is co-authored by Philip Morrison from the Victoria University of Wellington and Martin Hendricks and Marlos Hogebruggen from the Erasmus University, Rotterdam. Chapter four explores the differences in levels of happiness between urban and rural populations within each country worldwide. First, we studied who is happier. Is it the people of cities or their rural counterparts? We indeed found that there are differences in happiness across living environments and we further examined the Gallup data in order to see why these differences exist. There are three main takeaways of chapter four. Take away one. In most countries, people living in cities are happier than people in the countryside. The graph on the right-hand side shows that on a scale from zero to ten, ten being the happiest, the worldwide average life evaluation for the urban population is a 5.5 whereas the life evaluation for the rural population is a 5.1. The differences between the urban and rural population are the largest in East Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa followed by South Asia and Southern Europe. However, this is not a global phenomenon. In countries in the Western world such as the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and New Zealand, we find that the average life evaluation of the rural population is actually higher than the average life evaluation of the urban population. This finding is surprising because metropolitan centers in the Western world continue to attract people and generate a disproportionate share of their country's wealth. Take away two. Higher urban happiness in most parts of the world can be explained by higher standards of living and the better economic opportunities present in cities. If we look at the underlying reasons for the urban and rural happiness differentials, we see that urban areas in the developing world are happier because they are typically offer a higher quality of life in terms of income, employment opportunities and access to public services. When we look for example at Sub-Saharan Africa, we see that the urban population is richer, higher educated and has less problems to make ends meet. These urban benefits typically outweigh the possible negative aspects of living in cities such as the higher cost of living, higher levels of pollution, higher levels of traffic congestion and higher crime rates. Take away three. Lower urban happiness in the Western world can be explained by less affordable housing, lower levels of community attachment and more single person households and cities. In addition, we see that due to technological developments, many residents in rural areas in the Western world are no longer dependent upon farming and the recent expansion of urban centers means that many rural residents live and work nowadays in close proximity to these urban centers. Accordingly, rural residents are able to borrow the positive effects of much larger places such as employment opportunities and amenities while at the same time they are relatively protected from the negative effects of cities. We also see that there are considerable differences in urban rural happiness between the more affluent countries. In some countries, cities are happier while in other countries, the countryside is happier. These findings suggest that more research is needed to better understand the urban rural differences in happiness within specific countries. What we also need to do in future research is to better understand what kind of living environment matters for what kind of people. I hope that you will find our research interesting to read. For now, I hope you stay safe and wishing you all the best in these difficult times. All right, nice to have Martin join us electronically and by pre-recorded video and lovely to see the consistency and detail across these two chapters. We will now move on to George McCarron at the University of Sussex and co-founder and CTO of Psychological Technologies also a co-author of chapter five which is entitled how environmental quality affects our happiness. Thanks George. Thank you Lara and of course this work is joint with Chris Crackle of the LSE who we heard from just a moment ago before Martin. So if we look at our first slide there's an increasing concern around the world and justified concern for our environment for our natural environment and the quality of our environments in general particularly around climate change of course and thinking of Greta Thunberg extinction rebellion but also in terms of biodiversity, plastics in the ocean, organic pollutants and so on and in fact 62% of respondents on the Gallup world poll say that they would prioritize environmental protection over economic growth. Now as the background to this chapter there are several reasons to think that natural environments and high environmental quality will do good things for our happiness. In the first place there's perhaps an innate connection between people and nature which has evolutionary origins and has been called biofilia. In addition natural environments and good quality environments help to facilitate positive behaviors such as physical exercise which hopefully we can all keep doing and social interaction where as other panelists have said we're hoping to do distance socializing rather than social distancing in the near future. This relationship though is sometimes difficult to prove partly because it's difficult sometimes to measure people's exposures to different elements of their environments and also because natural experiments are a little bit hard to come by but the literature takes a range of approaches to getting around this and some of those are surveyed and reviewed in this chapter which is one of those chapters key contributions I think. We also do some of our own empirical work here and we take two empirical approaches in chapter five. In the first place we look at a very high level across countries at life evaluation positive and negative effect using data from the Gallup World Poll and linking that to environment data from the OECD in the World Bank and then the very other end of the scale we take a very low level a very local approach and we do an analysis within a single city of the world which is London and in here we have repeated happiness ratings with a timestamp and a GPS location so really detailed data which comes from the Mappiness app which does experience sampling and then we're able to link that with lots of data spatial data on immediate environments such as weather, air pollution, land cover and green spaces. There are advantages to each approach an advantage to our first approach of course is that it applies to many regions of the world it's generalizable advantages of the low level the second approach are that we get a much better estimate of people's exposure we're not subject to various kinds of country level confounding. I better move on to what we find so the high level results from our cross-country comparison tell us that emissions of air pollution in particular particular emissions PM 10 and PM 2.5 are associated with significantly reduced happiness across the countries of the world and we find that a 1 increase in PM 10 the larger particulates for example is associated with a drop of about 150th of one point on the zero to ten life evaluation scale now that's a small increase in happiness but then a 1 increase in air pollution is also a small increase so these are meaningful effect sizes. If we move on to our next slide the second approach at the micro local level and this is based on around half a million in the moment reports for around 15 000 volunteers telling us how they feel in London and in the in the chapter you'll see one long chart that tells us all the results in this area and we control for what people are doing and they're with the time of day the day of the week and individual fixed effects so these results are robust to a wide range of confounders and the key result that we find here we had already shown with mappiness data that natural environments were on average happier than city and urban environments and what we've done here is we focused on cities and we're saying that within cities green and blue spaces both seem to make people substantially happier whether they're in parks or allotments or in areas where there are trees in the streets both of those add about one percentage point to that happiness that people report and the effects are even bigger for blue space so people who are on or close to the Thames or a canal in London are between 1.3 and 2.2 percentage points happier and those are really meaningful happiness bumps. We also find moving on to the next slide that some of the activities that high quality natural environments best facilitate hiking, gardening, nature watching have some of the largest effects that we see on people's immediate happiness in this mappiness dataset overall and I guess at the current time we hope that some of these activities even if we are not able to socialize physically close to people depending on our situation some people we may still be able to get out into some of these pleasant environments staying far from people but enjoying those green and blue spaces which we have new compelling evidence here I think make an important positive difference to people's happiness. Thank you. Thank you very much for that George. As we transition to our next speaker I just wanted to send a friendly reminder to everyone to please submit your questions for the authors at the chat panel these questions will be addressed in our next in our Q&A session at the end of our speakers discussions. So next we'll hear from Jan Emanuel Deneb the director of the Wellbeing Research Center at the University of Oxford and co-editor of the World Happiness Report who is also a co-author of chapter six which is entitled Sustainable Development and Human Wellbeing. Thank you. Thank you Lara. This chapter is joined with Jeff Sachs and takes the notion of the environment for happiness to a broader scale as what we've heard before and that is to see whether the greed to which societies are actually achieving sustainable development whether or not that leads to greater well-being and happiness and so we were particularly excited about this chapter because it links two major data gathering efforts for the first time I think and on the one hand that is the Gallup world poll which measures well-being around the world and which is obviously the basis for most of the World Happiness Report and we link those data with the SDG index data compiled by the Sustainable Development Solutions Network and the result is the first global test I think of whether sustainable development is in fact conducive to happiness and if we jumped into the first slide then you'll see the main result really of this and it's very much in line with intuition which is higher levels of sustainable development are strongly correlated with higher levels of well-being in other words the countries that are doing most in achieving the SDGs are also the ones that are doing best in our World Happiness Report rankings with populations reporting higher levels of life satisfaction so you'll recognize the Scandinavian countries all the way on top in both the SDGs and well-being this is intuitive perhaps but where it may become less intuitive is that the slope is studying the slope of this relationship and as you'll see the red line the model fit the slope is increasingly steep in economic terms we essentially find there to be increasing marginal returns to sustainable development over time in terms of well-being in other words for countries at higher levels of development the degree to which their development is sustainable becomes an increasingly critical driver of their well-being or their populations well-being another important question is to look into the relative importance of each one of these 17 SDGs to see how they contribute to well-being and we approach this empirical question in a number of ways but we start with a basic correlation table so if we can have the next slide so if I can ask you to focus in on the figures within the red box that I've drawn you'll see the 17 SDGs you'll see the overall correlation is very close it's very very tight at 0.79 which is exactly what you just saw in the previous figure but here we split it up by the SDGs and again as expected we find that most of the SDGs correlate strongly and positively with higher well-being at the same time by unpacking the SDGs we also discover much heterogeneity in how some of these SDGs actually relate to well-being and so for example we'll find that the SDGs on good health clean water and sanitation decent work industry as well as peace and strong institutions are actually particularly strong so all of them are important but these are particularly important and but also note if you have more time if you're looking to regional differences that there are lots of differences there too and driving well-being the most striking result perhaps is actually on SDGs 12 and 13 and where we find a negative correlation with well-being and notwithstanding the overall SDG package to be very positively correlated with well-being and so this this lays bare empirically I think for the first time some of the tensions that we may pick up in our societies and it essentially comes down to the notion that while people may very much appreciate high quality natural environments as George McCarran and Chris have just pointed out in their chapter discussed just now the policies required to improve the natural environment and address climate change are difficult in terms of well-being at least in the short run and these tensions are in display when you for example compare and contrast movements such as extinction rebellion rebellion and Greta Thunberg who forcibly make the case to act on climate and you contrast that with social movements such as the yellow vests in France who started their strikes precisely because of climate action which was fuel duties being increased so there are these inherent tensions between sustainability especially as it relates to climate and environment and well-being at least in the short run and it requires more complex policy efforts in order to chart of course towards an environmentally sustainable and socially equitable growth that doesn't necessarily reduce human well-being as reported in the next table thanks for going to the next slide we do find that the underlying measures for climate action are strongly correlated with the general level of economic development in the first place which may in turn drive the relationship with well-being more than the climate action itself so I want to put this caveat in place and this is not the case for ASG 12 responsible consumption production where we find a negative relationship very much continues even when accounting for the general level of economic development if we move to the final slide here we kind of visualize the results of the 17 sg's unpacked in relation to well-being and the size of each one of these slices in this pie reflects how much of the variance in well-being between countries is explained by the variation in the sg scores for each one of these countries and so as noted before we find that those sg's that stand out are good health clean water sanitation decent work as well as industry innovation and infrastructure these are the ones that seemingly explain most of the variance between countries but as we found we when looking specifically at responsible consumption production that actually explains variance from an unhappiness angle so there's a number of caveats important ones to this analysis including a number of observations available to us and also when you split this kind of variance decomposition by world's regions you'll find that the relative importance difference between the sg's differs quite a bit from one region to another and so I'll conclude by saying that we strongly invite you to delve into the chapter more for more analyses and thank you very much for your attention thank you very much Yan we'll now hear from our final chapter author today Frank Martella at Ulta University who comes to us from the happiest self-rated country Finland he's the co-author of chapter seven which is entitled the Nordic exceptionalism what explains why the Nordic countries are constantly among the happiest in the world please take it away Frank hi and greetings from Finland which I said was today ranked happiest in the world for the third time in a row and actually like all five Nordic countries Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Iceland we're in the top seven globally and of course right now when people's lives and livelihoods are seriously threatened this happiness might not seem like the most important topic but my message here is that the same root causes that explain Finnish and Nordic happiness can also explain why the Nordic societies will be resilient in the face of this current coronavirus epidemic. So in this chapter that I wrote together with my co-authors Ben Gravebou Rothstein and you sorry we aim to identify what are the key explanations for Nordic happiness by examining the empirical support for various proposed explanations and we basically identified four key factors which seem to be explaining why Nordic countries are so happy. First one is the institutional quality which is about having function in democracy and well-functioning institutions so it includes factors such as free elections, free press, freedom of speech, low corruption, rule of law and government effectiveness and these all seem to like predict national happiness and can be as important as GDP in predicting that and of course like whenever institutional quality is measured the Nordic countries tend to come up come up at the top for example this freedom house has has an index of political rights and civil liberties and only countries to receive full hundred points from that in the latest edition are Finland, Norway and Sweden. Second factor is welfare state generosity which is about pensions, unemployment benefits, labor market regulation and other benefits to protect the citizen from various setbacks in life and this has been also shown to be associated with citizen happiness and Nordic countries are famous for their welfare state model with public healthcare free education and relatively generous benefits for those facing various setbacks in life so the Nordics probably don't have more extremely happy people than other countries but instead the state taking care of its citizens means that there are less extremely unhappy people in these countries. Third factor is about trusting other people and trusting institutions so it's about like feeling connected to others, trusting them and caring about them and this also predicts happiness and again Nordic countries have exceptionally high levels of trust for example in Finland as we regard like how many people are satisfied with the president 91 percent of people say that they are satisfied with the current president 86 percent are trusting the police and 79 percent say that they are happy to pay their taxes and fourth factor is about freedom to make life choices which also plays a role in explaining happiness so when people feel liberated from material necessity from political oppression and from cultural intolerance they are better able to live autonomously which also enhances their well-being so these are the four factors and these factors actually don't work in isolation but actually feed into each other if you can show the next slide so there seems to be like certain like virtuous people working here where well functioning and democratic institutions are able to provide citizens extensive benefits and security and because of that people tend to trust these institutions and each other and when they trust these institutions it leads them to vote for parties which promise to preserve the welfare model so the Nordics are like a high trust societies and this plays a big role in explaining their happiness but it also makes them strong and robust in facing a crisis some research actually shown that high levels of social capital seem to be make make people's well-being more resilient to various national crises so in the current coronavirus epidemic high trust countries will likely be more resilient and the high trust makes it easier to engage in coordinated action and more likely that people will help each other during the crisis so in the end it also makes people feel have to sense that we are we are in this together and by being united we will get through this so happiness might not be something that sounds too relevant today but trust is something all communities and countries need to get through this crisis and here the Nordic model seems to be especially well designed to generate such trust thank you thank you very much Frank just a final reminder to everyone to please submit your questions in the chat panel and we will be addressing those very shortly thank you to all the authors for sharing these interesting insights we will have the opportunity to learn more about each of these chapters in our upcoming sdsn webinar series on now return the mic to professor sacks for a few final words please go ahead Jack thank you very much we're at the end of the hour and I want to end first by thanking the authors of these wonderful chapters as you heard the report is fascinating this year with very path breaking work on absolutely key topics so it's a very very exciting read and I'm so grateful to the authors that have done such fantastic studies on ranking global cities on happiness the rural urban divide environmental quality and happiness by my colleague Yana Manuel on his leadership on studying sustainable development and happiness the great chapter really a very important one that everybody's interested in how do the Nordic countries do it and how does Finland keep that place so we learned a lot about Nordic exceptionalism I want to thank Laura you and all of our co-editors of the report it's a joy for me to have the chance to work together with you and I want to close by thanking our partners who make this possible Gallup as you know as you've heard for every chapter provides the foundational data and congratulations to Gallup on its leadership it does a unique job of enabling the world to understand life satisfaction the sense of well-being and many many other aspects of happiness and well-being through this marvelous work that Gallup does thanks to the Ernesto Illi Foundation and Illi Coffee what a great partnership and we're thinking of you Italy is in a very tough moment of this epidemic is such a fabulous country and such wonderful people please take care and we're hoping for quick and effective solutions and saving lives to Davide Bellotti and Davinas also thank you for your inspiration you told us about inhabiting the planet not simply living our economic lives and this is very smart for Jen Gross and Blue Chip Foundation thank you not only for your wonderful partnership and your wonderful words but also for your leadership right now in the Los Angeles area in in the midst of very rapidly expanding a pandemic the soup kitchens and the help for the most vulnerable people this is a reminder to all of us about the kind of values that lead to well-being and happiness so we're very grateful and to Unilever's ice cream brand walls were so thrilled to have you as a new partner and welcome to the family but of course Unilever is not a new cover to well-being and sustainable development it is rightly regarded as one of the world's flagship leaders of corporate responsibility corporate leadership for sustainable development your former CEO my dear friend Paul Pullman is an iconic figure and Unilever and walls continues to be in the forefront of the fight for sustainable development which we also learned today is very much the effort to achieve well-being and happiness so on behalf of all of us in the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network family and with special thanks to Sharon Poplar and to Cheyenne Maddox the Cheyenne Maddox and to all of our SDSN team let me wish everybody well thank you for joining us we will have a webinar on the happiness report for a longer and deeper dive into these fascinating chapters and please join us for our worldwide 24-hour webinar we'll circle the globe on April 22nd for Earth Day the 50th anniversary of Earth Day and we'll be celebrating that on campuses and SDSN members around the world if you go to the website unsdsn.org you will get the information for this fantastic 24-hour global extravaganza let me finally end by saying we've heard great words of wisdom I think uh John Helliwell statement should be the one that we close with that we're not talking about social distancing we are talking about physical distancing so that the virus does not transmit and this epidemic stops but we need social closeness we need to stay together especially at this time wishing everybody very well most grateful that you have joined us today thank you very much hello everyone this is Sharon Poplar we're now moving on to the question and answer portion of our webinar and we've compiled some really great questions please continue to submit questions as you see I was wondering a professor sacks Jeff are you still on the line there is a question that I could ask you I am of course camera so you can stay on the camera so this comes from I'm gonna not say her last name right but Judy and she asked how can these findings fit into a new united nations agenda that will be negotiated to the follow-up current one the agenda 2030 and how can we build on advocacy this is the UN agenda very much in two literal senses the UN agreed already back in 2010 2011 that happiness should be a core part of the global cooperative approach to development and then in 2015 the UN adopted the sustainable development goals and emphasized that sustainable development is at the very center of our efforts sustainable development meaning that we not just aim for economic development but also for social inclusion and for environmental sustainability well you heard in the chapters today that sustainable development is conducive to happiness and we also learned that environmental sustainability directly contributes to good health and to the sense of well-being and so the UN has this as its agenda this year is the 75th anniversary of the UN so I think what our agenda is is to recommit ourselves to the principles of the united nations to multilateralism especially in this very difficult moment and to use the UN charter as the basis for putting well-being and sustainable development at the very center of the world's economic social and environmental agenda thank you Jeff there's another question I have this for Christian Kreckl or George McCarron and UN asked in the environmental factors for happiness are there any cultural differences that's that's such a good question that's a really really good question actually I'm not 100 sure about that I would say that there are definitely country differences but it's very difficult to pinpoint this particularly in terms of cultural differences or whether this has something to do with the endowments of you know natural resources the environment environmental quantity environmental quality within the country I think it's difficult to separate this out in terms of cultural differences this might probably be better to be done with experimental research and George do you know anything there hi Chris no no I agree with what you're saying that I think it's difficult to disentangle culturally in terms of you know the environments that people have access to are used to and enjoy some of it you know we look at two scales in this chapter we look at the the broadest scale and the narrowest scale and actually it's most easy to tell a convincing story about environmental impacts on people when you look most locally and I guess that's a little bit of a challenge but that's a challenge that you know future research should certainly try to rise to and seeing how far these are universals and how far and there are these cultural distinctions that we control thank you for both now I have another question and this is for John Hillywall and it comes from Tim O'Shea for any all of the authors well I know that John can answer this Canada regularly ranks higher in the ha in happiness than the United States what are the clearest differentiators and how might these factors play out in the in the way both countries handle the coronavirus John how's that am I properly connected this is a question that's asked a great deal and so I I know from many years you will remember the six factors we use in explaining differences between countries and the Canada has higher values on five of those six factors than does the United States the only one where the United States is higher by about 20% is GDP per capita the differences on the social trust the generosity the freedom to make life choices and having someone to count on are enough to more than offset that difference and of course it isn't income per capita that's going to make countries respond more easily in the current environment it is precisely the warmth and the extent to which people are prepared to work together I was impressed and I mentioned earlier that it's how it's what you see about people reacting to conditions like this that give you real evidence about what kind of fabric is the society you're in I was astonished how much in my local jurisdiction British Columbia all the political parties essentially said we're all in this together and we'll we'll do what our experts tell us to do and in the just last week the health authorities issued self-tracking device to help people see what other treatment if anything they needed to monitor that condition where they've been and so on and that had only been on the available for people for two to three days and half the population of the province had all signed up on this and they had through a survey afterwards had shown that having learned what they learned about themselves and what the experts had to say they were much less likely they were less concerned they were much less likely to call the hotline much less likely to go to the emergency room and much more likely to self-isolate at home and one hopes to help their neighbors. Thank you John I think the next question the next question I will ask is for Yanni Manuel Deneve. Yanni and it goes on to the sustainable chapter that you wrote with Jeff and the question is one moment it just lost my port I think I texted um my understanding is that this is from Vanessa Timmeris my understanding is that SDN reducing inequality has a big impact on well-being quality of life why is it only a 0.32 correlation to the correlation table I know it's very specific. No it's a very good question um and I was personally also struck a little bit by that but last we forget this is a positive and a highly significant correlation with well-being so reducing inequality globally across nations is positively associated with uh with improving well-being if you look and where it becomes interesting is in table 6.3 where you look at the split between nations um I'm sorry between regions and then you find there's lots of heterogeneity so um where the reason why I think people like yourself or myself perhaps perhaps more surprised is that you just look at the european nations and you find that that correlation is even stronger in fact 0.71 twice as strong um so um so that seems to be explaining more variance between countries within europe in terms of well-being and it seems somewhat less strong if you look other regions around the world but that doesn't necessarily um so anyway so it's it shows that there's lots of regional heterogeneity and and and how this feeds into people's well-being but much more research needs to be done to try to really get this issue. Jan and Sharon is it uh perhaps I could add something to that because one of the special features of chapter two this year was to look at the effects of inequality on well-being we considered what it added if you thought of it as a seventh factor the answer is it added very significantly and indeed part of a good part of the uh Nordic results I was showing you were in fact because the uh higher levels of trust led to higher levels of well-being and much less inequality and that lower inequality itself was it pushing out well-being and we found those inequality effects significant in all parts of the world and this is in the context of our general model where in fact I think they're telling us something and it's subjective well-being inequality we're looking at you know people often think just of income as being the important source of inequality and it turns out that we find that inequality of well-being how access what kind of access people have to basic necessities to friends to a supportive social environment these other things that don't relate directly to income in fact are uh much more important and uh are really where inequality really counts thank you thank you both if professor sacks is still on I do have a question relating to Africa Jeff are you still on if not we can hi Jeff yes this comes from off men musa and uh they ask how can we help people in Africa understand the importance of the International Day of Happiness most of them are suffering due to COVID-19 how can we help them to improve life during this pandemic well the the key for all of us first of all is to stay safe and to try to stay away from the virus and especially to help keep older people and people who are highly vulnerable away from the crisis we're way behind the curve on this and in Africa in many countries the health systems are not strong to begin with so we need solidarity also to support African governments to promote community health workers who can help the control of the epidemic we need solidarity in sharing vital equipment especially for countries that don't have budgets on their own protective gear for hospitals and clinics we need to establish online support by WHO the World Health Organization to enable health personnel all over the world including in Africa through online means to get the information that is needed but I want to keep emphasizing that the first and foremost priority of this epidemic is saving lives and stopping the epidemic itself and we're in that battle and it's very tough and it's uh for the next few months and the whole world has to hold together so thank you for the question it reminds me uh how much we're going to have to emphasize help for countries that don't have the budgets on their own to be able to deploy all of the personnel and equipment that's going to be needed in this epidemic and I think that this is one of the key messages and a key reminder of your very good question thank you Jeff this next question is for our friends at chapter four about the urban and rural divide so Martin if you're still available if you could answer this question I will see are you on camera if not maybe one of our authors can answer this question so the question is given the urban rural divide and happiness how do towns and mid-sized settlements rank perhaps there could be planning which create created settlements of size which provided public services while still maintaining community and connection to nature let me know if you need me to reiterate the question does anyone want to answer sure I'll take a hack at that if you want there is something that I had wanted to mention on this urban rural issue and it's something that uh is taken up very much in chapter one uh is that the difference between urban and rural happiness you noticed it was higher outside a direct answer to this question is these peri urban areas tend to be partly between the rural and the urban uh in in in most countries the uh differentiation between the happy and less happy parts of the country often gets entirely almost entirely explained by the warmth of the social connection so in countries like Canada for example where we have a lot of data in big cities small cities rural areas and where in general the rural areas are happier than the middle areas are happier than the cities and it's almost entirely due to the extent to which people feel a sense of belonging to their local community and it's when that in those cities and in those neighborhoods where that sense of belonging can be built or restored or maintained then people are happier where those are so it isn't really rural versus city it's maintaining that kind of social contact and structure and and and shared values that uh that support life generally and they can be built and maintained in cities or in in rural areas and I'm sure the contact with nature is the same sort of thing an additional result to the chapter and work that George McCarron uh did is that we found that doing things in green spaces is very nice but to do them in conjunction with a friend or family member has a much bigger effect than just the environment itself and so whatever you're doing you want to do it in a way where you feel connected with others and ideally in physical connection with them and nowadays in a more remote emotional connection thank you thank you John I can maybe add to this another another angle so in terms of like the social connections I completely agree with John that is extremely important what you often see is that you know if you have like an urban core you have like a ring around it like a first ring and the second ring and usually in the second ring you can see that you know usually well being decreases quite a lot right so it's also like an important to have like a physical infrastructure that connects all these rings and that reduces frictions because government usually city government often ends at the urban you know with the urban borders and then sort of we have frictions in government and services and infrastructure that the train connection just stops doesn't go further and all these kind of things I think that people also feel like sort of left behind and there's also often not the possibility to get really into the social contact physically right because it simply takes too much time it's too effortful to actually do this bridge so that's an important uh an important role for infrastructure to take to connectivity Ashley Christian if you can stay on there is another question about um environments and so forth um the pertaining to your um chapter one moment let me just pull it up um or I guess this could also be to all the directors what environmental activities and amenities can local governments best introduce to increase happiness and well-being for all local society more green spaces such as parks and nature reserves or encourage uh encourage create blue spaces involving water sports activities what are your thoughts and suggestions you can start us off Christian and then any of the other editors can jump in yeah well it's a difficult question because it's sort of like points to the to the fact what is the most the single most important thing and I think there's actually not a single most important thing because there are many many factors which which actually play into that so I've done a lot of research on green spaces and uh green spaces do add significantly for people living in their surroundings by providing you know space for recreation by also providing health benefits if you're living closer to a green space encouraging you to do small sports um they are important they are significant actually for an individual small but they affect quite a lot of people um so that's why they're important but then again you know I would say I would find it difficult to like play it off against other things like infrastructure connectivity infrastructure um so I'm not sure that there's a single most important uh infrastructure type but there's more like a menu a balanced menu of infrastructure which also you know includes things like affordable housing high quality housing and of course there's always like a um a problem because if you increase increase green spaces right you take away space for housing and cities are often limited in terms of their size in the UK for example we have a green bird around cities which sort of naturally limits the the uh expansion that the city can get and I think it's more like a a mix of different policy instruments that need to come into into play to um to increase maximized wellbeing thank you very much um this next question is actually for Jan Jan if you're still on and if you can turn on your camera Sherman asks if there is one thing that we should implement in societies and workplaces to improve wellbeing what would the editors recommend um I don't speak necessarily for all the editors but I think for a few uh when I say social connections social capital in the workspace so we in a in a previous world happiness report and a chapter called happiness at work um we um studied all the possible drivers and aspects of employee well-being and out of all possible dimensions from how many how many hours you spend at work to how much you're being paid to work life balance to the quality of relations on the job what we found stood out as number one was how you rate the quality of relations on the job and so for example it's a cliche in the HR industry but people don't quit their jobs they quit their managers so if they're unhappy with the social ties around them their their their colleagues and especially the line manager that's when they actually make the decision to leave companies and so if there's one thing that if I mean there's many things people can do to try and improve workplace well-being and if there's one thing if I can only do one thing it would be to try and improve and make more space for positive social connections and particularly with an emphasis on line managers so that would mean specific interventions some of which are known and I'm happy to share this offline to try and improve links and how managers appreciate and work with their team members there's a number of specific interventions to try and raise empathy and making managers better managers really and I think it's that that's the key is that the whole middle management that doesn't get that doesn't usually take advantage of executive education classes or does not give be given the opportunity it's working with middle management corporations I think is where the biggest gains are to be had in terms of improving workplace well-being excellent Richard I wanted to add to that because I think work is a hugely important part of our life but all of our life is affected by our mental health and when you look at what facts as best explained the huge variation in happiness across the populations especially in advanced countries you see that the single factor that has the biggest influence is the individual's mental health in a very precise sense whether they've ever been diagnosed with depression or anxiety disorder this is a much bigger factor than income or even the quality of work in explaining the spread of happiness and unhappiness in the population this would not help us to solve your problem that the questioner asked if it went for the fact that we now know an awful lot of what to do about that mental illness we've got really good evidence-based treatments in Britain we've been rolling these out throughout our national health service in a brand new service and the service are now being copied in six other countries based on the latest evidence of the effectiveness of different types of therapy I think it's also very important that we should see the schools as major levers for improving the mental health of the population preventing mental illness and there again we should be using evidence of what forms of school organization and school teaching promote mental well-being in the children there are some very very good programs when I've been involved in called healthy minds but others worldwide that can be used so that we don't depend to teach life skills we don't have to depend on an absolutely brilliant teacher we can know that ordinary teachers well-trained using these brilliant materials will be able to change the life of children and we also know that the emotional health of children is the best predictor of whether the same person will be a happy adult so I would say if you asked me the question I would have said and a completely new approach to mental health that's the treatment of people with these terrible problems really causing chaos in many families as well as for themselves and serious use of the school system to promote mental health thank you Richard that was actually a question that someone had and I don't know if you wanted to expand on this but as young as will happiness level be changed along with education standard of people in a country should happiness be linked to physical mental and spiritual elements do you want to expound on that yes I could say a little on that when you're talking about expending education you you you may be making reference to more people staying on longer in our education and if we're talking about that we should very much be talking about what kind of education are they staying on longer in because we have had in many countries a shocking neglect especially this is true in Britain and the United States a shocking neglect of the vocational education of people who don't go to university and I think that to give them a proper introduction to adult life through an apprenticeship of the kind that is being offered in Germany and some other countries would be hugely beneficial for well-being and a sense of purpose of those people otherwise I come back to my point about changing the purpose of education for everybody the purpose of education should be thought of to enable the young people to experience happy life themselves and to create happiness for the people whom they can touch either through the work that they do or through their family life or whatever and this is not something that just should be assumed to happen by accident it shouldn't be assumed to happen just because of what the parents do for the children in our research we've had this extraordinary finding that schools make as much difference to the happiness of their children as the parents did so a very strong focus on the happiness of children and the necessity for teachers all to be trained in mental health and also I would say to be given a higher status in the community generally thank you Richard Jeff there's two questions that are more specific to you if you are still on the line I am hi Jeff so there's two questions one is from a SIPA student Sofia Zhang she first asked do you have any suggestions for future topics relating to well-being and sustainable development and I'll ask the second question after you answer that why don't you ask the second one also the second question is oops I just lost it um I actually lost it I'll be right back with you you can go oh can you explain more about SDG 12 on responsible consumption and the production and production explains negative variants I think that's actually a John question no no no that that comes out of our paper yeah with yana Manuel basically the reason in a simple way that these two environmental SDGs SDG 13 and SDG 12 show up as negatively correlated is that richer countries do worse on the sustainability of waste management which is SDG 12 and on carbon emissions which is what's measured in SDG 13 and what yana Manuel showed and what the chapter on environmental quality showed is if you dig beneath the simple correlation there are real reasons to believe that environmental sustainability is in fact very important for our well-being but at a simple level the rich countries are the polluting countries they pollute with the wastes which is what the SDG 12 is focusing on and they pollute with the greenhouse gas emissions which is what SDG 13 is focusing on well in terms of the research agenda the fundamental question that we're asking is how to raise the world's happiness and what can be done most effectively to improve well-being we have in addition to the world happiness report a report each year called the global policy report on happiness and well-being or the global happiness and well-being policy report which is produced by the global happiness council that is created by the government of the united air of emirates with the participation of many other countries and the idea there specifically is to ask what public policies are most conducive to promoting happiness now we've been discussing that throughout this session but i think that that is a continuing and very active area for work how to put happiness into the political agenda how to put happiness into the policy agenda how to identify or measure the policies that do promote happiness from those that take away from well-being. Bhutan famously has a global happiness national happiness commission and they're looking for many many years specifically at evaluating how policies affect life satisfaction and well-being and i would say from a research point of view and somebody at CEPA at columbia university school of international and public affairs this is a very topic how should our politics be organized how should our policies be organized in order to promote this life satisfaction which all of us as editors and as the UN system believes should be the centerpiece of after all what our public policy is about. Thank you Jeff. This next question is actually for our resident Nordic number one country Finland this is for Frank and I have two questions for you Frank if you are still on the line and you are indeed if you can turn on your camera the first question is can happiness be a life goal could helping others be that life goal or be a life goal the second question is Ignacio which he asks my question is whenever variables such as number of patients hit by depression or even suicide rates have been taken into consideration in the report do you think you could find any correlation or contradictory findings between the highest ranked Scandinavian countries and these rates I know this is something that we've editors are always asked. Okay thanks for the questions so first was like if I have to correct like can happiness be a life goal and first and I think that you know I think happiness is a very good goal for like on a societal level that in the societies we should like aim to improve people's happiness I think that has been like an idea of democratic society since the 18th century that one key goal and like justification for having the government is that comfort should be like pursuing the goal in increasing people's happiness but on an individual level even though it's good to have like a certain level of happiness and be happy but I think like sometimes like if you too much emphasize your own happiness if you focus too like strongly on making yourself happiness that can actually backfire not even make your like less happy because too much focus on your individual happiness might make you like you're unable to like be satisfied with any situation you're always looking for like is there something which is still better somewhere else and that makes it makes you miss out on enjoying the life as you have it right now and also it easily makes you like too selfish focusing only on yourself which makes you neglect your like social relationships which we know is like one of the key sources of happiness for most people around the world so that was the first question and the second question about like these depression rates and suicide rates around the world and as you guys told that for depression it seems to be that it's like quite hard like having a reliable international comparisons of depression rates because when we have like international comparisons people who are like severely depressed tend to not answer these surveys so because of that like when you look at different like international comparisons of depression rates there's like very much like variability and in one ranking Finland might be like right close to the top in the second ranking might be like the middle and the third ranking must might be one of the countries like quite low on this depression levels and I think it seems to be like you know when I've been looking at these like different like rankings it seems to be that in the end Finland is somewhere in like average level in terms of depression and other Nordic countries as well so the Nordic countries are not the best countries in the world in terms of like preventing depression or even preventing suicide but they are not the worst countries either and they seem to be like working quite like relatively independent of each other especially the suicide rates it seems to be something which doesn't have too much to do with the national happiness level because it's still so rare occasion that it might be like some other factors on driving it which don't have much to do with what is the average level of happiness in the country. Thank you very much Frank I just like to add to everyone that I have a post these questions and also answer them oh hi John can I add a little bit on the on the suicide issue because almost 20 years ago I was asked this question very frequently about if they're so happy and Sweden why are they committing suicides so frequently so we put together a very large data set at that time and used exactly the same model very like the model we use now in the world happiness report to explain differences across countries in happiness and use the same model to explain differences across countries in suicide rates two of the key variables in both were the extent to which other people can be trusted and the warmth of frequency of social connections with other people both of them had exactly the same effects on suicide rates as they had on life satisfaction improving life satisfaction and raising suicide rates the fact that countries were different on suicide rates and life satisfaction were basically different effect sizes on other things such as divorce being worse for suicide and then for life satisfaction religious affiliation being more protective against suicide then production of happiness higher government be better government being more important for life satisfaction than preventing suicide so Sweden for example fit both models perfectly and in both cases there was no inconsistency at all so I was able to use that frequently in subsequent discussions including this one I'd like to ask you Sharon if you could pass the microphone to Lara to say something about the previous question which is about the value in making pro-social behavior a focus of life and how that related to life satisfaction because we had a special chapter on that last year and she was the principal author and she could help us thank you actually Lara is no longer online but we can share her chapter on that unfortunately that she's no longer on but we can share so all of these questions will be posted and we'll try to put a q&a document with this webinar I see that there are still a lot of attendees left and I do still have a few more questions we can keep going if you want but this is the question to all our um authors or experts on the line do you find any key differences in the environment in terms of gender equality and well-being does anyone want to answer that I want to comment on the if I may on the previous question because I thought that what Frank said was was extraordinarily important um that is I mean most of the problems that people have with the idea of happiness is a goal is because they're confused with is it a goal for a group of people for a society or is it a goal for each individual to be pursuing the answer is obviously that it should be the goal for the overall outcome in society but we're not going to get that achieve a good uh result for the society if each individual makes it their personal goal um in fact uh as we know John Stuart Mill and others have pointed out that if you're always thinking about your unhappiness uh you probably aren't going to be even very happy so we want people to be getting their happiness through creating happiness for other people and I recently published a book called can we be happier and I made what I think is a really important distinction between for each individual between what is the happiness that they experience and what is the happiness that they create we really want individuals we want an outcome where people are experiencing happiness but for that outcome to come about we want each individual to be a creator of happiness and the way we should think about how we do how do we create a happy society is by making individuals into creators of happiness and each of us ourselves trying to be creators of happiness thank you um Jeff I have two AI questions for you will you be able to turn on your camera of course so as young as so there's two questions yes young as is there any AI and blockchain technology on coronavirus detection and the second comes from Lucas who asks what do you think how should we approach AI automation from a global perspective a lot of reports know that actually they can broaden the gap between those who have and don't have access to new technologies on the first of whether AI is used for corona detection I'm probably not the the expert on this except that the the best detection we have right now is what's called PCR detection of the virus itself of polymerase chain reaction detection of the virus and one of the big problems is that that it requires equipment and there's therefore under testing right now and much more infection than is apparent from the measured data because many many people infected are not recorded in the data because they haven't been tested by the approved system so I think we have a a testing method but it has not been expanded adequately in in most countries that's part of the scramble right now on the broader question about the role of AI and the digital economy on well-being there's a lot to say but I think the short statement is that these technologies are very powerful and they're causing a major disruption in the workforce a lot of people will lose their jobs because of automation or the shift to e-commerce or the shift to expert systems and that raises many questions about the income distribution basic income retraining and also with machines being able to do so much work taking greater leisure time and having the leisure time more fairly shared in the society so this is a general topic of the interest and research and a lot of anxiety too because one thing we can say absolutely for sure right now is that the digital technologies are powerful they can accomplish a lot they can have a high productivity but they will displace a lot of work and they will widen inequalities in various ways and therefore pose new challenges for a solid heuristic approach to a very changed type of work environment maybe Yanemah well wants to add to that just a little bit because Jeff you're obviously completely right and I just want to build a little bit on the how will the AI in future work impact the drivers of employee well-being because most economists talk about the how will it displace jobs and will there be transitioning and the impact on income and equality and I feel like we need to also bring into the mix the how will the future work impact employee well-being because we know that jobs are more than just a pay associated with them and so the question becomes these other drivers or the other aspects of a job that are so important like identity like social relations like a routine throughout the day how will these be impacted by AI and I'm worried on that front because when we run these analyses of which are the important drivers the ones that are most important are also the ones that are most being put under pressure of AI so if we think of our gig economy type workers their manager and their peers are either nonexistent or algorithmic platforms as a manager who are essentially bossing them around there's no human connection for a lot of these people there's the advantage of flexibility through these gig platforms but the downside is people have completely lost their routines they have strange working hours and odd sleeping patterns as a result and then in the crisis now this week we're going to see a million people being laid off in the United States and asking for employment benefits well most of these are people in the gig economy so in a way COVID-19 is laying bare a lot of the issues of the beginnings of the future of work and in conversation with the ILO director most of the focus at the moment is on the quantitative aspect of job displacement and transitioning more much more attention needs to be brought on to how that will change the role that work is playing for well-being and as the questioner have rightly pointed for a handful of people or a small minority it will improve their ways of working but for the vast majority of people it will put more pressure both on the traditional aspects of income inequality and putting more pressure and skill polarized but there will also be put pressure on their typical drivers of employee well-being so on balance I'm very worried about the role how the future work will influence well-being thank you Jeff and Jan we're about to probably be wrapped up because it's almost 12 noon here in New York City there is one question that I would like to ask before we end but I just wanted to remind everyone that we have collected all your questions we will indeed answer them and we'll put them on our website please also know that this webinar is being recorded and it will also be posted and we will share that I want to invite everyone to go to the world happiness report website and read all these wonderful chapters that we prepared this year so I am going to ask the last question and this is just I guess open mic Renuka Patel asks please suggest what would be the basic need of happiness for people living in different living standards in our societies with different means and then we can wrap up with that does anyone want to take this question nobody I will actually first give it to you in second to thank everybody we're at the end of the hour and John will give us a departing wise words thanks what's most important is that the things that support happiness are those that are relevant locally and that decision is made locally rather than top down so the question they will evolve in the community that's connected they will discover what's most important in their lives looking ahead what we did discover quite early on in this research was that the basic needs of life and especially the social ones were equally important in every culture so the kind of things we've been emphasizing today about creating an environment in which people feel they belong and they are masters of the design of that is absolutely critical more so now than ever but at all stages of development and in all cultures we have found so the the things that we share in terms of what is important they are much more important than the measures on which we differ I've been asked to thank everybody for the contributions it's been heartwarming to see the community of spirit that people have had and the number of people who have joined us for this webinar thank you all very much and keep safe I'm returning it now I think to Sharon thank you everyone for joining this on the webinar again your questions will not go into a black hole we will try to post them and answer them as best as we can again please go on to our website at the world happiness report and read the report and feel free to ask us any other questions that you may have and we hope that everyone says safe and wash your hands and continue to have social connections during this difficult time that we have thank you everyone