 Hello everyone, good morning, good afternoon, good evening. We are about to start this session on accelerating education for the SDGs to dwell on the translation that our colleagues from the SDSN China have done of this report. But we're going to give a couple of minutes to our participants to join. So I ask you all to patiently wait just a few minutes until we get started. Thank you very much. Recording in progress. So I see that several people have joined in the last minute so just good afternoon, good morning, depending on where you're joining us from. We are about to start we're going to give perhaps two more minutes to participants to join. I'm very excited about the agenda that we have for today's event and hearing also from you and your thoughts about about this report and how you're working on your universities. So I'm going to propose that while we wait for the rest of participants to join that you use the chat function. You can see in the bottom of your screen to introduce yourselves and where you're coming from we're very keen to hear what university you're joining from or if you're a professor, a student. You're part of the administration of the university if you're a member of as the essence network. So just take advantage of that function to introduce yourself and perhaps also to start sharing your thoughts about the report or any activities that you are or your institution is conducting on education for the SDGs. And then in one more minute we will get started. Thank you very much. Wonderful. So I'm going to propose that we get started. So welcome everyone. Thank you so much for joining us today. My name is Maria Cortes Pooch and I am the Vice President of Networks at the Sustainable Development Solutions Network. We're going to be launching the translation to Mandarin of a report that SDSN produced last year called Accelerating Education for the SDGs in universities. It was launched last year on September of 2020 during the International Conference of Sustainable Development and we've seen a massive uptake of this report. It is in fact the most visited resource of SDSN at the website of SDSN. And it has now been translated to Spanish to Mandarin, of course, to Korean, as well as to French and Portuguese. So we're going to get started with our first panel. So I'm going to welcome Tal Kestin that is the manager of our SDSN Australian, Zealand and Pacific Network that is hosted by Monash University. I'm also going to welcome Yi Zeng that is the head of the Office of the Institute for SDGs of Xinhua University. She's also the network manager of our SDSN China hub. So welcome both of you. Tal, I believe that you are going to begin by making a short presentation of our report. So please go ahead. That's right. Thank you very much. So hello everyone and welcome. And I am really thrilled to be coming to you today from Melbourne in Australia. And I wish to pay my respect to the elders past and present and emerging of the lands on which I am joining you from as one of the team who put together the Accelerating for the SDGs guide. I am so excited to be here at the launch of the Chinese translation and I really would like to thank everyone who was involved in particular the Xinhua SDG Institute. What I've been asked to do today is to give you a bit of context about the guide where it came from what it is about where we're going next with it. And this is pretty much what I'll be doing with a small digression in the middle to give an example of the work that my own institute is doing the Monash Sustainable Development Institute in the area of education for the SDGs. So, in 2015, the UN launched the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development called Transforming Our World. And at that time, my SDSA network for Australia, New Zealand and Pacific was working a lot on the different roles that different sectors have in helping to meet and achieve the SDGs. While government and business seemed to be getting a lot of attention, it was very obvious to us that universities themselves were very critical in many ways to achieving the SDGs. And based on that, we put together a guide called Getting Started with the SDGs in universities, which we launched in 2017. It was amazing to see the reaction to that guide. It created a lot of conversations within the sector, including at the conferences, the annual conferences that Maria mentioned on the international conferences on sustainable development. And during these discussions, what really emerged was that one of the areas where universities have a huge potential to influence the achievement of the SDGs, but that possibly they're not fulfilling their potential as much as they could is around ensuring that their students are ready to be helping solve the challenges, sustainable development challenges in whatever profession they are choosing in their life. And that maybe it was useful to share good practice from around the world on what that actually looks like. So two years later, after a lot of work, we published Accelerating Education for the SDGs last year, and really what we tried to do is put together a guide that aims to inspire and empower universities and other tertiary and higher education institutions to provide their learners with the knowledge skills and mindsets to contribute to solving the world's sustainable development challenges and achieving the sustainable development goals by offering practical approaches and guidance and resources and inspirational case studies. So very briefly in a nutshell, the report includes the why universities need to do education for the SDGs. What does it actually look like in the university. And then a couple of chapters looking at the how universities can do it. How did they actually implement it. I think this is pretty obvious. I hope it is for you but the basically societies facing pretty incredible and urgent challenges around climate change but around a whole lot of other things, and that we really need everyone on board to be helping address these challenges. Universities reach millions hundreds of millions of people in the capacity of professionals, helping them develop their professional skills and the opportunity there is incredible if all these people could be contributing to achieving the SDGs. So really we put very strongly for the case that universities should be doing this for all of their students. Now education for the SDGs covers a really broad range of skills knowledge and mindsets. A lot of it is based around education for sustainable development, but also around global citizenship and a whole lot of other educational agendas are being slowly incorporated into what it means to do education for the SDGs and we explained some of that in the guide. And because the SDGs are very broad agenda, you can actually incorporate them into practically just about any kind of university activity from the curriculum to extracurricular activities to even things like signage and campaigns within the university so it's very versatile. So there are some aspects of it, what makes it really quite unique that are a lot harder to implement and these are transformative learning approaches that really build important skills around systems thinking problem solving dealing with complex situations. But I'm not really business as usual in the way universities work and they include things like interdisciplinarity. They include action based learning and they include working with stakeholders from different sectors. Some aspects of education for the SDGs are actually fairly straightforward for universities to implement. And we recommend that they approach it from in a very strategic way. But these transformative learning approaches are actually not easy to do within the way universities currently function. So after four of the guide, we actually put forward the idea that maybe universities need to change the way they do things to actually help speed up, including education for sustainable development in their courses. And I'll actually come back to that in a minute. First, I wanted to also mention that really one of the exciting things about the guide was the collection of case studies. And as part of the original guide we collected 50 case studies from around the world showcasing really innovative ways that universities are doing education for the SDGs. And as things fresh we actually did another round of collection this year and added another 75 cases. These cases represent over 40 countries and cover really different areas of the university curricula and co-curricular activities, high universities are engaging with communities. And universities are doing inside the university to try and speed action on education for the SDGs, things like training, you know, building capacity for lecturers, creating communities of practice, all kinds of things. They're all stored on a website hosted by the Technical University of Madrid and really I thoroughly encourage you to check it out. And I'll go back to chapter four of the guide, which was really putting forward that universities, the way they're currently structured is not really going to respond to the urgent need for change. And that in like the changing incrementally is just not going to be fast enough. There's no need to potentially change in the way universities do things. And one approach that we propose in the chapter was run something called the second operating system, which is creating a space within the university that is able to actually function in a somewhat more agile way in a way that breaks silos where it's easier to create partnerships and focus on real world challenges. And so I actually wanted to give you as an example, my own Institute, the Monash Sustainable Development Institute, which in many ways functions like this. And because of that, it actually allows it to do very interesting things around education. So my Institute, I don't know if anyone has heard about it. But the its mission is really to do research, education and engagement that works to understand influence and transform systems for sustainable development in Australia and our region, and we collaborate with partners, build knowledge and capacity and drive practical change. And we were established about 10 years ago, we sit outside the faculty structure in the university, but we work with all the faculties and a lot of external stakeholders. And I think we have about 200 staff now so it's quite a big Institute with a long history. We currently are focusing on six domains of change with actually leadership for the SDGs being one of them, but there's a whole lot of other areas. But what I think is really unique about the Institute is the principles that it's based as a work on being mission based. So we choose work to do that is about addressing real world needs about everything we do is in partnerships and collaborations both internally within the university and with external stakeholders. We value different ways of knowing. So it's not academics always know better, but we value the input of the professions that we work with. We experiment a lot, we test different ways of creating initiatives of implementing them, and we learn from those, and we are taking a systems transformation. So it's looking at the whole system that we're hoping to change, not, not just one aspect of it. And for education is that we've been able to implement some really interesting and unusual kinds of educational activities, specializing in interdisciplinary multi stakeholder impact focus programs that are done in collaboration with other parts of the industry and with a lot of external stakeholders. They include things like leading leadership for sustainable development master stream as part of a cross faculty masters on environment and sustainability. A leadership program that's already 20 years old but has been refreshed around SDGs called green steps. We've just implemented a new Institute that is training politicians to make better decisions for the complex world that we're facing today. We have programs around social entrepreneurship, a PhD program that is actually focused on the SDGs. We're working with other faculties to help them develop their own curricula that are focused on sustainability and change. And the reason I think that we are able to do these kinds of things is the fact that we function in a somewhat different way to traditional university faculty or school. This aspect around transformations actually resonated with a lot of people after the guy published and really the guide was meant to be a springboard for ongoing conversations and we realize pretty quickly that this concept of transformation was where we felt there was a need to have a lot more discussion. Our university is really capable to respond to the urgent need for sustainable development transformation in society, or do they need to change to be a better able to do that. A couple of months ago at the conference, the ICSD conference in 2021, we launched a new working group to actually think about this issue and provide, I guess, try and collect best practices and disseminate them, as well as create a conversation about the role of universities and how we can help them focus more on SDGs. We kicked it off with a really amazing discussion with some university leaders and I've included the YouTube link there and I thoroughly recommend that you check it out. And this is an area that we have kind of just launched and we're getting going, so please watch this space. So you can download the original guide and the new guide, the new Chinese version and all the other versions from the SDSN website. And I hope you do that and check it out. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Tal. We're moving now to Yi Zeng. Please, the floor is yours. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you, Maria, for having me as the panelists here and thank you, Tal, for, it's really a thorough introduction to the report. Now I'd like to share my screen, and it should be right in the middle. So, since Tal has already presented the report thoroughly, so I would love very much just run to the topics, and it was very much of a joy and informative process of learning when doing the translation last year. So, I do have few highlights and takeaways for our colleagues and our audience today. So, in this report, it actually brings up a new concept of the ESG education for the SDGs. So previously, UNESCO has announced the concept of ESD and ESD for 2015 to 2020 and ESD for 2030. Six days ago, UNESCO has also published a new report in the reimagining our future together, which put our vision to the 2015. So this report actually brings up a new idea of ESDGs. That's actually, if we do have time, we can come back to this. How does Tal's team come up with the idea of framing these new ideas? Actually, as long as I was doing the translation, I could feel the ESDG concept actually reminding us that this new concept actually indicates that integrating the SDGs into universities is not only a matter of teaching and researching, but it actually intertwined with a university's management and its social impact. So now it comes to the difference while I was doing the translations. So for the left side we have, I do put the Chinese version of the graphic here for our audience, but on our right side is the five main role for universities in China, defined by the MOE here. So the reason I'm mentioning this here is not pointing out how different these two interpretations are. On the contrary, my point here is even though it seems different, yet these are strong similarities and moreover, there are lots of overlaps among different roles no matter which interpretations. For example, we have the living labs, which is widely used in Europe and introduced in this report as well. The concept may be relatively new to my colleagues in China, but however, lots of experience we did actually with the same approach here in China, just not only under the name of living labs. For those who's not familiar with this concept, the living lab is actually an integrated approach to teaching and researching that allows students to design, practice and test and share the new solutions on campus. So one example here I found in Tsinghua University is during COVID-19 pandemic, students in Tsinghua has designed the automated access control device for taxing human temperatures, which could actually minimum the human contact. So the living lab approach is not only developed student the ability to solve real world problems, which is the same scenario as the SDGs, but also contribute to the transition from the daily learning to the real lifetime research which could solve the problems. And also from my point of view, the best way for universities to integrate the SDGs is not separate different roles, different role of universities, or separate different targets to different schools or sectors. It's actually better to remain the overlaps and see them as the opportunities to call for course sectors or interdisciplinary cooperation, eventually trigger the systematic change within the universities. And here, it's actually leads to the third takeaway is the UPM case. Actually, I got the learning from the Times Higher Education Summit as well. One senior university leader said that the traditional structure of universities divided into subject-led faculties or department can sometimes deter researchers from working more collaboratively on SDG related topics. Nowadays, universities are embracing the SDG related research and led to the creation of thousands of academic collaborations, including new local and international networks of scholars, but also in sometimes unexpected new institutional structures such as cross department working groups within universities. So the pace presented here in this report, which I found very enlightening is it has pointed out the two-way blockages inside the internal behavior of the universities. So they, the UPM have worked, worked out and created the ITD UPM as a second operating systems to restore those organizational system by addressing complex problems of sustainable development and co-creating practical solutions involving agents from all of the fear. So as, as Todd just mentioned, there's a pool of case study websites. There are lots of case studies. You can find the website in the end of our report. And there are also a lot of resources and tools at the end of this report as well. It will be much of be useful to our colleagues. As for SDG for SDG of Tsinghua University is where I'm working with nowadays. We do have four main roles, which is talent training. We have SDG dual mastery programs in cooperate with University of Geneva and as MPI program with SDG focuses. And also we have the executive training programs focused on the SDG as well. We do serving as the research center and think tank at the same time. And with the SD SN network, we are working as on the international network and cooperation at the same time. So these are a few areas we are working on and starting from last year and released earlier than in this year. We have done the Tsinghua SDG report. This report is actually combined 36 indicators resulted from the times higher education impact rankings and around the 60 cases in Tsinghua University. My feeling is with was doing this work is actually a process of educating the educators. So our colleagues have been empowered during this process. Now they know there are there are so many ways for many things that they could do in their daily work and life that actually can help with the SDGs. I do hope this, this report could bring more perspectives and cases to my colleagues in China. So that we educators and practitioners could actually contribute to the implementation of the SDGs, more importantly and particularly in terms of shaping the main site of our future generations. Please feel free to follow us on our social media platforms or reach out to us or myself via email. Thank you so much for joining this session and back to you Maria. Thank you very much for this phenomenal presentation but then also, of course, for doing the translation of this important report. The network of the SDS and China hub is active and really resourceful. And we've heard how Tsinghua University is really pioneering some of these transformations and I encourage everyone to read the Tsinghua SDG report. Let's move to the next part of this event. We have Dr. Shue Lan, Dean of the Schwarzman College and co-director of the Institute for SDGs of Tsinghua University as well as Professor Saks, President of SDSN and Director of the Sustainable Development Center at the Earth Institute of Columbia University. Welcome both of you. Thank you very much for joining us. Amira, I'm going to ask to stop pinning a Yi so that we can see Professor Saks and Dr. Shue Lan and then this next session of the event is scheduled as a dialogue between the two of you and I want to throw a couple of questions at you to see what you think about the role of universities in ensuring the achievement of the SDGs and also how can universities from China and the US collaborate on this very important mission. So over to you. Jeff, it's so wonderful to see you. Maybe you can start. Great, great to see you and wonderful to be together. Greetings to all friends at Tsinghua University and across the region and thanks to Maria for all the leadership. Yi, you made a wonderful presentation so we're very pleased and excited. And Lan, it's great to speak together. Actually, after two, I think rather positive developments. It's a first that China and the United States agreed during the COP26 summit to more cooperation, and especially on on the climate agenda. I think that this is a very positive development and, of course, it gave a lot of hope to everybody at COP26. And then we're just hours after the summit meeting between President Xi and President Biden, which at least on the initial roundout was a very good, constructive, long discussion with a lot of our known colleagues involved that talked about the importance of good collaboration and a number of various including again the climate agenda and sustainable development. So, I think this gives us a basis for even more, not only more optimism but more room and action for cooperation and collaboration. So, let me ask you what your, your sense of the current situation. And also is in the midst of many reforms right now. Many new commitments on sustainable development on decarbonization on biodiversity conservation. Maybe you could start with a little bit of your sense of where we stand now after COP26 and after this important bilateral summit. I think I fully agree with you that we are quite positive to see the, you know, the read out of the summit between President Xi and President Biden. I think it's really a wonderful thing after, you know, quite many years of this kind of a tension. And I think we've already seen some hopeful sign there as what you just said, I mean that, you know, sort of the, you know, the joint declaration between China on the climate. I think that, you know, China I think, you know, has in a way I think in terms of really implementing SDGs. China has been very, you know, consistent in its efforts in trying to implement the SDGs and so I think it's some recent development I just wanted to highlight two. One is poverty alleviation. I think, you know, since, you know, 2012 I think since President Xi came to the office and so he actually took this poverty alleviation as a major policy priority. And so there was a through a consistent sort of really effort of the entire country over the last, you know, sort of eight, nine years and, you know, so last year I mean, you know, I think actually a literally this year's, you know, July 1 that President Xi announced that China has achieved its goal to eliminate, you know, sort of the poverty, you know, I think, you know, after many years efforts. So I think that's the, you know, a major achievement, you know, in implementing SDGs. The second is in the process, as you just mentioned, is the that last September, when actually the September the 20, September the 22, you know, of last year that President Xi announced China's, you know, goal to achieve carbon neutral by the year before the year 2060 and also to, you know, reach the peak of 20s by 2030. I think those two, you know, those announcements has already been translated into major actions in China. And so in the in the, you know, just a bit over a year. I think they already I think many efforts within China in pushing on this in terms of renewable energy development in terms really many industrial process, you know, trying to, you know, update their technology and trying to eliminate the old coal based technologies and so on. So there's indeed a whole countries effort in moving, you know, in trying to reach this goal. So I think that indeed we see some tremendous efforts of the entire country in in trying to achieve. Now in China's been so called the double carbon goals. So I think that's, you know, it's sort of the new new trend with what we see. You described but we've heard a lot recently about President Xi's call for common prosperity, which to me sounds a lot like sustainable development also very consistent with sustainable development. What what does what does that mean in in China's policy context right now. Yeah, I think that one of the things that what people have seen China has indeed achieved a tremendous economic success over the last 40 years of the reform and openness. But behind the success. So it's also quite some sort of inequality in a way in terms of the, you know, income and consumption. I think that the different numbers but but still, according to, you know, to various numbers, at least more than half of the Chinese populations is still, you know, relatively low income stage. So I think that that's where I think that in a way that the prosperity that we see that China has achieved has not been at the benefits has not been equally shared. And that's sort of where I think that the government has felt that, you know, now it's time to think about how actually we can bring, you know, the whole population to enjoy a more, you know, equitable benefits of the economic benefits China has achieved. So so that's sort of the, they in a way they go off eliminating the sort of absolute poverty, but also I think now is getting how we can bring more people to the so-called mid income group. So that's sort of, you know, the next goal. It's very interesting. Actually, of course, the United States has had a period of significant increase of inequality. Also, during the last 40 years, we think about this as, you know, somewhat two different processes, but actually it's rather similar timing. I usually say, you know, President Reagan came to power in 1981 and went for growth and so forth. And we've had 40 years of much wider inequality, which we're trying to grapple with now, not easily. China's reforms started also, or the current phase started roughly 40 years ago also. Deng Xiaoping famously said, getting rich is glorious. And China got very rich during the period, but as you say, like in the United States, widening inequalities. We know that SDG number 10 calls for reducing inequalities within and among countries. So it's actually very much on the same timescale, same kind of phenomena, and probably would be very useful to do some joint research together to understand because there are a lot of similarities in the timing, the underlying technology factors and so forth. Absolutely. I think that one of the things that I think what, you know, you just started, I think that's very fascinating to see the comparison. I think that some people are now concerned about, you know, what's the approach to achieve this, you know, to sort of try to reduce this kind of inequality. And we try to, you know, increase this common prosperity. I think that some people may are somewhat concerned whether the government whether to use some kind of administrative measures to achieve this. But that actually that's, you know, the various policy documents made that clear that that's not true, but the China certainly wants to make sure that indeed the incentive for economic growth is still. You know, I think the market based system is still, and there I think that's the way I think the economies is based on, but at the same time, they also see how to provide to the better opportunities for people, you know, in terms of education in terms of the healthcare, in terms of job opportunities job training and so on. So that's where I think a lot of the efforts probably will be made. But also, I think we also have to say that China's tax system is still, is still, you know, not quite, you know, complete, it's still, there's some, you know, quite some tax reform that's probably needed. And, you know, as a policy analyst, I think we know tax is a very useful policy tool. So how to use that tool more effectively is that's another approach that, you know, the government is now thinking about. But ultimately, I think it's, it's really how do we, you know, bring more, you know, sort of, you know, wealth, you know, to be shared, rather than to cut once, you know, to, you know, the, you know, the cut once rich, you know, the wealth to give to the others, that's really that's not the case. But indeed, but how to, particularly how to bring, you know, the whole jet, the whole population, you know, to share the, you know, the benefits. Certainly, you know, you know, there's a lot of challenges. I think a different kind of challenge than certainly compared to the US and so I think China has a lot to learn from the US experience. Well, so maybe learning from each other. Maybe some plus some minus we're, we are releasing the SDG index for the US states this afternoon in the United States. I think there's a huge, huge divergence in the US of how different parts of the country are performing which is very interesting. And there I also think the geographical differences, both China and the US are vast countries with huge geographical differences of structure, population and so on. We find in the United States, the Northeast is more or less on the path of sustainable development, New England, New York, New Jersey, not perfectly but more or less, whereas a lot of the US south and west has much higher poverty, and so we're really highlighting these geographic differences so this is another area actually I think we're study could could make a difference, especially with with vast countries, and I think also bringing in in our university and the European universities on this question is very interesting because probably of all the regions of the world. I would think that northern Europe has best balanced the prosperity and the low inequality, and has been able to create really effective systems of healthcare education, and other social consumption I would say that ensures universal access and keeps the inequality down, but keeps the prosperity quite high so very interesting lessons there too. Yeah, I think actually, you know, since we're talking on this topic, I think also how it's related to, you know, sort of to to the climate change and so on. A few days ago I was having a discussion with one of our international students who, you know also is watching, you know the cops 26 very closely. And he was sort of making an argument about, you know, about how to balance, you know, the, you know, reducing carbon emission versus economic development. And so he's arguing is saying that now I think, given that, you know, you know, the developed countries have already, you know, develops enough and now China is joining that group. But still, there are many developing countries are still on the, you know, sort of the path to growth. And so they will I think as they become more developed and they will certainly consume more energy. And so at the moment, the coal is there only reliable, you know, and cheap sources of energy. So, so basically, the argument is that now you are trying to face out the coal and the but but I think that that will certainly sacrifice the benefits of some developing countries, you know, welfare. So my guess is, you know, to what degree that we can, you know, help to, you know, I think through our research through our effort, how can we actually say that indeed the world is making a real effort in also helping developing countries to address this problem I know that the, the, the, you know, the commitment by the developed countries to support to help the developing countries. That issue has not been fully resolved at the cost and the six right. Absolutely not, not at all. And I think one of the, again, one of the areas where we can and I think should work together is that China and the US are co-chairing the sustainable finance part of the G 20. But there aren't answers yet, because we need solutions for sustainable finance that haven't yet been found. I actually put on the table or posted yesterday. And we thought about how we could have some actual levies on co2 emissions used to finance the energy transformation in the developing countries as one idea. But I think this needs study. And that's what we're here for the universities actually to study these things. And since there is this umbrella of US China cooperation, I think US China university common study of these issues would would be really advisable. I also see an opportunity for that kind of cooperation in the Africa context, because first a number of things to my mind China provides the best roadmap and role model for Africa for how to escape from poverty. China went from something like 80% poverty to zero in 40 years, which is should be Africa's aspiration. And so China really provides a lot of important knowledge that I think needs to be understood and developed in the African context how to take good lessons and how direct partnership and particular projects and programs can work. But if it's done collaboratively with the United States and Europe that it actually of course, really enhances that possibility as well. And it addresses the challenge of energy that you're talking about. In fact, in Africa. One fact is that for the poorest countries there's very little electrification to begin with so it's actually starting from scratch in a way. The opportunity to do it in a green way from from the start is is very important. China's the low cost producer of highly efficient photovoltaics, and so on so that seems to me to be another great area for really for doing this analysis. Perfect. I think that one thing that you know relates to this report on education and, you know, on, you know, sort of education for SDGs. I, I thought that your comments at the very beginning and for forward I think was really fascinating about the, the need for interdisciplinary work. And I think that, you know, I think you also talked about your experience in running the Earth Institute. I think that's a fascinating experience that that maybe you want to share with us a little bit, because I think that in a way, university, the gene of university, partly it's so disciplined. The institution is built on, you know, various disciplines. So, for so many years people have talked about interdisciplinary. You know how to, you know, in terms of education in terms of research, but it's so hard. Particularly at the, you know, the well established university. It's always so difficult. So, maybe you want to share with us a little bit about your experience in running the Earth Institute, how Earth Institute has been able to do that at Columbia, how do you bring different disciplines together. Well, I'll, it's really a fun and fascinating questions. I've had a lot of fun with it for 30 years and trying to run institutes at Harvard and at Columbia. Along those lines. There's one basic point and then there's what a couple very operational points but the basic point is, if you are a chairman of a normal university departments, say economics, our field. I want the best economist who's going to publish in the best economics journals. And so it's a very disciplinary focus, a very focus based on the metrics of the profession or the discipline. But if you do it differently and say, I want a faculty to address climate change. Suddenly everything's different because you say, oh my God, that's a complicated issue. What do I need? Well, I need some climatologists. I need some energy engineers. I better have some economists that are specialists in this. I need some behavioral psychologists to understand social psychology. I need some political scientists. Suddenly, when you start from the perspective of the problem. The interdisciplinarity is not just a theory. It's a necessity because you can't even take one step forward without all of these experts. And then because they're working on a common problem, for example, this complex problem, how to decarbonize before 2060 very complicated. You need that range of engineers, economists, finance specialists, political scientists, sociologists, you really need them together in order to be able to do that. So that's the big picture for me is that if you're aiming for disciplinary excellence, universities are organized for that. If you're aiming for broad complex problem solving, then we need not our departments, but we need these broad initiatives. So a practical question, how do you finance it and how do you hire people for it? And that has been the challenge for 30 years in my own experience on the financing one needs creativity and new sources of financing but recognizing that since universities are there to serve humanity through knowledge. And since these are crucial problems, there actually does develop more and more financing to try to answer these complicated challenges so that becomes a practical daily issue but not a fundamental obstacle. And then is the question of how to hire and recruit and by what standards and so on. What I'm happy about is that the notion of sustainable development is becoming a discipline. There are PhDs in it, there are master's degrees in it, there are journals. And so in this sense it becomes more natural that there are now metrics and standards for hiring and reputation and ability to put new faculty in place. But there still is a tension and I think a creative problem solving that each university needs to have. At the Earth Institute, we had everybody with two appointments, one at the Earth Institute and one in a base faculty. So they were both within their discipline and in the interdisciplinary setting. Now Columbia is actually introducing a new climate school. So it's just going to be hiring for climate change studies. I hope that's right. You know, I liked the Earth Institute model, but it had hiring problems now Columbia is trying to introduce another variant of this. But I would say three main points line just to conclude which is focus on the problem and then interdisciplinarity is necessary. Second, solve the practical problems of paying staff and running programs. And third, most of us have a core discipline and an interdisciplinary commitment, both. And so finding a way to have two homes for scholars and students I think is a useful approach. That's absolutely I think wonderful I think that's something I think very very critical I think for many of us, you know in this field and and you are I think your experience are so essential for all of us to try to learn from. Before I see Maria up there and before I we end on let me just bring it bring up another issue related to this one. I think that that's what actually I think many university I think China included I think it's in terms of research based institutions. You know, I think that indeed our problem, you know, driven. For example, I think China also recently started a research institute on common. And I think, you know, there's also climate related research institutions. So that's relatively I think now, you know, common. Another challenge is how do you organize your training your eight your degrees along those problem, you know, a problem based rather than a discipline based I think still university degree tend to be more disciplinary based. Combined it to that I think you know it's another challenge for example I think I remember the few years ago I was on a Qinghua University committee. And we're talking about how to bring you know other you know so knowledge to the to a particular engineering program and the engineering professors was very resistant. They were saying that they have the body of knowledge they really have to pass on to students before the students can graduate. So there's only so much time you have so so how do you do that. Just to say we jumped at Columbia straight to a PhD in sustainable development in 2005. It's been hugely successful in that we've had brilliant students, and they have gotten brilliant jobs afterwards, which is the test of the marketplace. The, the way I summarized the the program, Lon was to say, you have to satisfy two advisors, one in the social sciences, and one in the hard or engineering sciences if you can do that that's sustainable development so it was a very operational, operational kind of perspective, but I know we're at the end of our time I at first I just want to thank you, Lon for all your leadership and Qinghua. What a great university and what a beacon for the whole world. And I look forward to in the coming months and years to raising even more our work together. I think in all of the interdisciplinary we also need inter regional word globally interconnected world. We depend on each other for global well being. And so I think in all of the geopolitical processes and challenges on climate on the pandemic on inequality and all the rest there's so much we can do together. And I'm glad our governments are speaking fruitfully and cooperatively together it gives us even more space for the kind of cooperation we so much cherish and look forward to. Thank you so much I think I fully I think agree and I'm sure that we have more opportunities and more issues to work on together. Wonderful. I'm very very excited to do it. And Maria thanks so much for bringing us together thanks for the launch today long great great to see you. Great to see you. Thank you both very much for such a rich and inspirational talk and I echo Professor socks words. And you are such a leader in the network of SDSN your your thoughts and insights are always. Most welcome. Thank you everyone that joined us today and you have the link to the report now translated to mandarin thanks once again to our SDSN China hub. See you all and we will be posting the link to this recording for everyone else to see. Have a good day. Thanks to everybody.