 Good morning, everyone, and welcome to this talk on value nature's benefits in India cities. Indian cities, as we can see from this nitrite satellite image, are magnets of growth. There are reasons why people come to cities, right? We come for economic opportunities and for various other kinds of opportunities and needs. But at the same time, India cities are also concentrations of a number of environmental challenges, as indeed, are cities across the world. There's problems of waste, of urban heat islands, of flood, of smog, and a variety of other environmental issues. And then, therefore, it becomes very important to explain to policymakers, to planners, to the media, and to the public at large why nature's benefits in cities are important for everyday resilience and well-being. Because otherwise, these services become invisible and ignored and neglected. So what I'd like to describe today very briefly is results from about 15 years of work we've been doing across Indian cities. Looking at what kinds of nature services can we bring to the attention of people? And there are, of course, three broad categories, provisioning services, regulatory services, and cultural services. Of these, we find that policymakers and media attention is relatively easy to focus on regulatory services. For instance, we have research on trees and the importance of trees in Indian cities, especially on roadsides for pollution and heat control. This has received a lot of publicity and especially in civic action and public interest litigations in Bangalore and in Delhi. This particular research has been extremely widely used, has received publicity, and has been very useful in helping stop the felling of trees to a large extent. Our research in Bangalore on lakes and wetlands has shown how these are very important to combat drought and floods. And as a result, many of these lakes and wetlands have been restored to become areas where you can actually hold water, help in groundwater recharge, as well as becoming hubs of recreation and play. So far, all good. But the problem then becomes that there's a ban on grazing, on fishing, on wood collection. In fact, on all the traditional uses that thrive in many Indian cities, on sacred uses, on the supplement of nutrition, of milk production, of clothes washing by migrant workers, all of these are either neglected or excluded specifically from lakes. Beyond this kind of science-focused discussion of provisioning and regulatory services, we also record a lot of imagination. For instance, there's a very powerful traditional rain song called Maleraya, which talks about the king of rain and asks him to pour down. Not pour down by himself, but pour down with his mother, his children, and his entire family, because the banana and mango orchards have dried. And so they talk about their loss of livelihoods. And then, very powerfully in the song, they ask seven rulers of seven villages to come together to sit and talk a while and then plead with the rain god. So in this song is a sense of community, is a sense of family, and a recognition that without these, you cannot have any kinds of nature services in the city. That these are essentially commons that serve entire communities. And that is a sense that is slowly slipping away. While we have focused on nature services for regulating pollution, hydrology, and other kinds of extremely important things, we also see that a sense of these as commons, as places for cattle washing, for migrant workers, cultural services, like worship of trees, and a variety of other traditional cultural associations, all of these are slowly fading away from our cities. So value in nature's capital is extremely essential for well-being and resilience. But currently, the recognition of this value is mostly focused on supporting and recreational services. So we've been looking at how can we ensure that sacred and cultural uses and provisioning uses are not lost from this discourse, and how diverse imaginations of nature services can be protected and brought back into the discourse. Towards the same, we've been talking to lake users, for instance, and we have interviews with over 100 lake users of various kinds, their mothers, their corporate employees, their transgenders, their migrant workers. This gives us a good sense of the heterogeneities of use. People come to praise their cows, they come for inspiration, they come for prosaic users to wash their clothes, or to watch the scenery. And you need to get these users together. So what we've been doing very successfully is to have photo exhibitions and public events, for instance, where these people can speak to the public at large, giving their perceptions of lakes, their perceptions of nature services. We do these bilingual in Canada, the local language as well as English, and hold a variety of public exhibitions where actually people walk off the streets, for instance, in a metro station and say, well, I've crossed this lake so many times, but I never thought that there were people around this lake that used it in this way. And so in this way, I think we can try and go forward because I'd like to conclude then with this kind of, with saying that, how do we actually try and get these diverse services into imaginations? Because while valuing nature services is very important, there are other approaches that we need to learn and draw from. And so I'd look forward to hearing from you to figure out if any of these approaches are things that resonate with you or that you've used at various points of time. Thank you very much, and I'm very sorry I couldn't be here in person, but I look forward to hearing from some of you, hopefully by email.