 So our final keynote for this afternoon will be introduced by Professor Jeffrey Sacks, Jeff. Wow, what an incredible program we just had, and what an incredible finale we have now. I could not be more thrilled to have the opportunity to introduce Columbia's wonderful president, Juan Manuel Santos Calderón, with us. Columbia has had two absolute grand slam homeruns for an American. I don't know how many goals that adds up to in a World Cup, but it's a lot of them in recent years. Columbia, and that's Columbia, I should be clear, Columbia was the great innovator of the whole concept of the Sustainable Development Goals. So when the president comes, give him a special thanks for that. It was in 2012 when the governments of the United Nations came together on the 20th anniversary of the Rio Earth Summit to ask what to do, given that 20 years earlier at the Earth Summit, a lot of great agreements had been reached, but they had not yet been implemented. And it was the government of Columbia that said, we need to bring this to the people of the world. And they put on the table the idea of sustainable development goals, carried the day, and that brings us to where we are today. And for that, we are all profoundly grateful and in admiration. But the next triumph, I think, is as remarkable and is notable for the world. And that, all of you know, Columbia is the great peacemaker of the world in recent years. Columbia is the country under the president's leadership that ended a decades and decades long war and did so with incredible imagination and creativity. Now, this is our second chance in two years to host President Santos. He was at the World Leaders Forum in September 2015. And I'm not saying it's all causation that he came to Columbia University and then got the Nobel Prize the next year. But I would like to think that there's a little bit there. But anyway, we are absolutely thrilled for that so meritorious prize and also the inspiration that it gives for the whole world. So it is really a very distinct honor and great pleasure knowing how wonderful this gentleman is and what a world leader he is and how combining peace and sustainable development. It does not get better than that. So please join me in welcoming President Santos through the stage. Hello, President. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you, Professor. Thank you for that very kind introduction. We're not choreographed properly. I think we're going to sit and you're going to talk. Is that right? Or you're going to stand and talk. Or if you want to talk and I sit. No, no. I definitely do not. We're here to listen to you. So please, if you want to use the podium or if you want to speak here either way. It's OK. I'll speak from. Well, thank you very much for attending this. It's not a conference. It's simply a chat. I thought it would be very interesting for you to know how the sustainable development goals were structured, how they finally became a law of the United Nations because it was approved. They were approved by the United Nations in the year 2015. And I thought it would be good to carry you on that path of how we did it, how we have been using three key words that I want to convey to you that are necessary in the implementation of those development goals. And those three key words were also extremely important for us to be able to reach peace in Colombia after 53 years of war. The first word is ambitious objectives. To put yourself very ambitious objectives. The second is innovate, innovation. And the third, persevere. You have to be persistent for the objectives to become reality. How did the idea of the sustainable development goals emerge? As always, there's some people, some persons, group of people who have very good ideas. The important thing is to hear them and give their good ideas to try to implement them. We have here one of those persons, Paola Caballero. She's here with us. She was working at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The world was discussing what next after the millennium goals. We had in Colombia been very disciplined in trying to fulfill the millennium goals. We were about 85% of the goals we managed to fulfill. But what can we do afterwards? So the idea emerged. Why don't we unite, merge sustainability, which was a word that was getting more and more fashionable and important, with development, with the causes of underdevelopment and how can we rally the whole world around some goals, not only the developing countries? So that's how the idea of why don't we merge these concepts and have the sustainable development goals as a goal for the world? At the beginning, as usually happens, these ideas, especially in the multilateral diplomacy, are very difficult to sell. There is a tremendous degree of skepticism, idea coming from a developing country, and many developed countries. Why should we be part of that? And we started to persist. No, because we think that it's a world problem, not the problem of only the underdeveloped countries. It's a problem of the whole world. Sustainability is the responsibility of the whole world. So we should have goals that involve the whole world. This skepticism started to weaken, and we started to play multilateral diplomacy. What do I mean by that? Multilateral diplomacy needs, think of concentric circles. You need to get a group of countries interested and then enlarge the number of countries interested in whatever costs. We started by the region. Some of the countries were a bit skeptical or lazy. They didn't want, I mean, this is too ambitious. This will not work. But other countries got enthusiastic about it, country like Peru, Guatemala. That sounds good. Let's work on it. And we started a process of convincing a critical mass of countries to defend the idea of sustainable development goals. So the region, God involved. You need also validators from international institutions. The Secretary of the Economic Commission for Latin America of the UN, of the Mexican Alicia Valsena, she got very excited. She became a great validator. And then we went to other countries. For example, the United Arab Emirates, they got very much involved, very enthusiastic. So slowly it became global. And some people asked, but why Colombia? Colombia is a country which has a war. Colombia has many problems. Why should Colombia be the leader of this initiative? The simple reply to that question was, why not? Why not Colombia? And the fact that it was an underdeveloped country or developing country suddenly became an asset. Coming from a developing country has more credibility. And so the idea started to become a strong idea. And countries started to add their names to the initiative. And finally, in the year 2012 in Rio, we made the proposal, the formal proposal, that was accepted. What aspects were important for this initiative to really get the strength to be approved three years later by the United Nations in the General Assembly here in New York? I would say, since the beginning, we said, let's find validators outside the normal stream of validators. And so the private sector, which usually is not very much involved with UN decisions, we invited the private sector to get involved. They were very enthusiastic. And they became tremendous allies all around the world. We invited the civil society. We said, civil society must be a part of this. They should understand the importance of this initiative. And the more civil society gets involved, the more legitimate the initiative will become. And civil society responded very positively. We made a tremendous effort for almost every single meeting. And we had hundreds, I think, thousands of meetings with many people. That civil society should always be present there. And that gave the initiative a tremendous strength. Finally, in the year 2012, it was approved. I remember very well the Secretary General of the conference, Chinese, stepped down from the podium and said to me, Mr. President, Colombia is a small country, a relatively small country. But what you have just proposed is a country with big ideas that will have a tremendous impact on development. The Chinese are fully enthusiastic about this initiative. And we will support you all the way. And so finally, in the year 2015, the Sustainable Development Goals were approved. There was an enormous discussion of how many goals and what goals. And this discussion was very academic, but also political. And we finally agreed on the 17 goals after many discussions. Number one goal was poverty, reduced poverty. Because poverty is probably one of the worst enemies that sustainability has in the world. Poverty, it really is one of the reasons why many of the actions that the world makes against the environment happen. So reducing poverty as a necessary condition to have a sustainable world was one of the goals that we put and we put it as number one. But the discussion there was fascinating. I remember we were discussing with the British Prime Minister about what goals, how many goals. We had different panels. Our ministers participated in those panels. And somebody from a Scandinavian think tank went to my office in Bogota and said to me, you're doing the wrong thing, President. And I said, why? He said, too many goals, which I thought he had a good argument, too many goals. But this is a political discussion to reduce the number of goals right now. It would be very difficult. And he said, you have the wrong goals. And I said, why do you think we have the wrong goals? And he said to me, what do you think is the most important thing anybody can do in the world to save the planet? And I immediately thought, well, plant a tree, reforest what we have destroyed. I was thinking of Humboldt and what he said 200 years ago, man is destroying the forest and mankind will pay for that. And I said, we have to reforest. And he said, no, there is one action which is 10 times more profitable in terms of the dividend for the planet, for the environment, which is saving the coral reefs of the ocean. It was a surprise for me, but it was too late. We had already sort of agreed on the 17 goals. And that type of discussions we had throughout the whole process. But finally, the goals were agreed, and everybody started to implement the goals. That's a big challenge now. Are we going to fulfill those goals? This brings me to the second example that I wanted to share with you. We said, OK, Colombia, we need to comply and try to fulfill these goals, poverty. Again, the word innovation, high ambitious goals and perseverance. And we sat down and said, what can we do to be more effective in the fight against poverty? And I remembered a former professor of mine. He was a professor of mine. Unfortunately, I didn't go to Colombia. I went to Harvard and the LSE. He was a professor at Harvard at the LSE also. Amartya Sen, Nobel Prize winner. He had a completely different approach of the traditional approach of how to combat and measure poverty. So I went to him. And I said, Professor Sen, you have an institute. He has an Institute of Human Development in the University of Oxford. I would like to try your approach in my country. Will you help me? And he said, of course. And we designed a whole new institutionality, new institutions, and a new approach to fight poverty. We defined 45 different factors that a family should have in order to consider him not poor and address those factors with a one-on-one approach. We changed completely the way of fighting poverty and that helped us tremendously, for example, to focus our social spending in those areas that would have the biggest impact in the fight against poverty. And the last six years, we've been able to reduce poverty more than any other country in Latin America. We have reduced extreme poverty. We were a very unequal country. We still are, but we managed to reduce extreme poverty by half. And if we continue the trend, extreme poverty will disappear by the year 2025 from Colombia, being one of the countries with the highest rate of poverty in the whole world. And this has been extremely effective because we innovated, we had a new approach. Now, roughly 60 countries in the world are following this type of, it's called a multi-dimensional poverty approach or following this type of policies to fight poverty. And that's an example of how we were able to, our being, we will not finish that, finish yet, but we have been advancing satisfactorily in the fight against poverty. We did this with almost every other of the development goals, but I'm not going to bore you with the history of the 17. Maybe jump from the number one to number 13, climate change. In climate change, we did a similar approach. How can we innovate? What can we do to really contribute to this responsibility that everyone has to stop climate change? My predecessor was one of those who didn't believe in climate change, so he abolished the Ministry of the Environment. So I said, let's reverse that. And the first thing we do is we have to recreate the Ministry of the Environment. We did that. And we started saying, what is it that we have to do? As a country very rich in biodiversity, Colombia is the second most biodiverse country in the world, the most biodiverse per square kilometer, the density of biodiversity in Colombia is the highest in the whole world. And we were endowed by God with tremendous natural resources, water, that we need to start protecting areas. So we set ourselves some very ambitious objectives we had when I came into government, roughly 13 million hectares of protected forest. We said, let's double it. We have already doubled it. Just last week we took a decision to protect one of the most biodiverse areas in the whole world in marine biodiversity around an island called Malpelo. It's north of the Canápagos Islands in Ecuador, which is, some people say, the richest area in terms of different species of fish and marine biology. And that raised our protected areas to $28.5 million, $2.5 million above the target that we had set ourselves at the beginning. And we will continue until the last day of my government. I have here the minister of the environment who said, who tells me that if we continue at this rate, we will be over $30 million for sure at the end of the government. We then also said, what is it that we have that is important for us to protect? There is a word in Spanish that I don't know why it doesn't have a correct translation in English called Paramo. Paramo is the sort of wetlands in the top of the mountains of the mountains that are near the equator. And there are not many Paramos in the world, but Colombia has 50%. Those are really factories of water. You go to the Paramo, and what you see is water going out, and that's the source of the fountain of many of our rivers. Colombia has more water than United States without Alaska. You fly over Colombia and full of rivers, and we need to protect that. So we started to limit all these. We have 37 of these so-called Paramos with a unique vegetation. And these factories we must protect. We have already protected 24, 25, and we will protect the 37 before I leave next year. We also said, who are the best guardians of biodiversity and of the environment? Our indigenous people, our indigenous communities, when I took over the presidency before going to Congress and inaugurating myself, swearing that I will abide by the Constitution, that same day, I went up to a beautiful mountain near the Caribbean coast in a place called the Sierra Nevada, where the oldest indigenous communities are. And we called them our older brothers. I went to them, and I asked permission from them. They're blessing for me to take over the presidency. And they gave me their blessing, but they said, you have a mandate. You must protect better what they call Mother Earth because you are destroying it. The world is destroying it. And she is getting very mad, and she will react. And you are going to suffer by that. And I said, well, I promise I will do my best. And that week, the worst phenomenon of La Niña, the Florens, started in Colombia. We have never had such a natural disaster. I had to handle that for two years, more than 3 and 1 half million people who were affected by that. And they said, this is what I told you when I said that Mother Earth is getting bad. And we had last year the worst phenomenon of La Niña, the drought that we have ever had in our history. So here we decided to give the indigenous people more land around the protected areas, the natural parks, the reserves, for them to help us protect our biodiversity and our environment. And so we have been expanding and giving them self-governance in order to help us protect the environment. This has been another example of how we have been compliant with the Sustainable Development Goals. We, of course, were very active in the negotiations of the Paris Agreement and the Paris Summit for Climate Change. We were the first country in Latin America to put a tax on carbon, on carbon emissions. And we are completely compromised to fulfill our targets there of lowering our emissions, at least by 20% as we signed the agreement. Those were just simply two examples of how you have to innovate, think with a different approach, and persevere in order to fulfill your goals. And of course, in order to be able to do that, we needed to have peace. A country at war, a country at war in a war that had tremendous cost, of course, of human lives, but also from the environment point of view. The tax on the oil pipelines, for example, if you add up how many oil has been spilled in our rivers and our seas, if you sum up all these attacks, they're equivalent to 14 times the Exxon-Bardes disaster that you remember was the worst disaster ever in the history of the world, 14 times. The war stimulated illegal mining. Illegal mining uses cyanide and mercury, which contaminate permanently the water. The war stimulated the production of coca drug trafficking. And that was a tremendous stimulus to deforestate our Amazon jungles. So one necessary condition to be able to comply with the development goals, a sustainable development goal, was stop the war. That was difficult. It was a big challenge, but what did we do? We set ambitious goals. Many people said that would be impossible. Almost all of my predecessors had tried. They had failed. But again, innovate. Let's have a different approach. So there, what I did was I brought in some new and fresh ideas, people who had hand-on experience in other parts of the world to come and help me think how to do this, how to initiate a peace process that could have a large degree of success. And they started giving me ideas. One idea that gave me that has been extremely important was in every peace process in the world, the victims have been neglected. They have never been taken into consideration. And they are the ones who had suffered the war. If you want to have permanent peace, if you want to have a peace that lasts forever, you need to take the victims into account. And I said, that's a great idea. Let's put the victims and let's put their rights, which are stipulated in a treaty called the Treaty of Rome, that regulates the armed conflict resolutions in the world. And they have four rights. The rights to justice, the right to the truth, the right to reparations, and the right to non-repetition. So we said, let's put the victims in the center of the solution of this process, and let's start negotiating around the victims and their rights. The first thing we did was to approve a law that allowed us to repair the victims. We didn't even have a law that allowed us to repair the victims and to give the peasants the land back that was taken from them because of the violence and start repairing and healing the wounds of the war even before we finished the negotiation. That was a crucial aspect. Another crucial aspect was let's identify the stakeholders in the peace process who have been the ones who, for some reason or another, have been against the peace process or have been spoilers in the past. And immediately the military emerged. And I said, well, let's bring the military in to the process. So I appointed two generals, the most prestigious generals, one from the army, one from the police, as key negotiators. And I started going around the country, explaining to the soldiers and the officers a phrase that General MacArthur made famous and says, the soldiers never want war because they are the ones who put their life at risk. They always should fight for peace. And I told them, peace will be your victory. Help me achieve that peace. And slowly we were able to convince the military establishment that peace was the best in their interest also. It was not easy because there's always all kinds of prejudice and all kinds of suspicions. Oh, they're going to then make a peace and they will do away with the army and I will lose my job and I will have no benefits. And many of those ideas that we had to erase from the minds of the military establishment and they became fundamental allies in this process. The other aspects of the peace process that were important. In today's world, asymmetrical wars that like the one we had in Colombia, it's very difficult to negotiate if you don't have the support of the region, of the countries that are in some way or another affected by the war or involved in the war. And so you have to use their diplomacy. And I had a very bad relationship with the then president of Venezuela, Chavez. Very bad relationship with the then president of Ecuador. But I said, if I want peace, I need to have a good relationship with them and we sat down. And we said, listen, you and I, we think very differently but let's work together on what your people and my people are in agreement that would be good for them, for all of us. And that is peace around the whole region because it was the last armed conflict of the whole of the Americas. They said yes. They started helping in the peace process. That was another key factor, the regional support. Then the support of the whole international community. The United Nations got involved and they have been extremely, extremely supportive. They say this is the only good news that the United Nations received in many, many years. It's Colombia's peace process. The Security Council has already unanimously approved three resolutions, giving a mandate for us, for example, to monitor the ceasefire, then to monitor the disarmament. Now, the last of the arms of the FARC are in some containers being destroyed. And tomorrow, I'm going to go with the Secretary General to signal the place where we're going to build a monument of peace with the arms that would be melted. And we have a contest of the artist to see who wins the monument. And then we will build three monuments, one in the United Nations, one in Cuba and one in Colombia. Why Cuba? Because Cuba was the host country. Why did we choose Cuba as a host country? Because it was an island, because it was secure, because the Cubans had a lot of influence in the guerrillas for many reasons. So we are now in the process of finishing this phase and starting the other phase, which is the construction of peace. Because peace is the silencing of the arms is the first phase, but that's not peace. You have to construct it. It will last a long time. You have to start by healing the wounds of millions of victims, displaced people, changing your attitudes. The pope went to Colombia a few days ago. He went there specifically to help us reconcile. And he said, Colombia needs reconciliation. This will take a long time. You have to change your attitudes, but you're going in the right direction. Go forward. And that's what we're doing now. So these are three different examples of how we were able to put the Sustainable Development Goals in the agenda of the world and approved by the United Nations, how we have two of the 17 goals we have approached each goal with this attitude of innovate, put high objectives, and persevere. And peace that we have now will allow us to fulfill, to be able to comply with the objectives much easier. Without peace, that would have been impossible. Without peace, you cannot go. And recuperate a forest that had been destroyed. Without peace, you cannot fight poverty as we are fighting poverty. So the peace was a necessary condition which have fortunately been fulfilled. This is the experience I wanted to share with you. And Professor, you said that there would be a question and answer. And we have some time to answer questions. And I hope this is wonderful. Wow. Ending poverty, protecting the planet, reforesting, making peace. Not bad. Very, really wonderful. We have a very short period of time for maybe one question, maybe two. There is a mic. Please, right here, if you could stand up, introduce yourself. Please be brief. The president has to leave momentarily. And we have to clear the auditorium by 5 o'clock. So we'll just have maybe two questions. Virgilio Viana from Brazil, a Sustainable Amazon Foundation in Manaus. My question to you is a regional one. The Amazon is one of the biggest assets of Colombia in countries like Brazil as well. But the challenge that we have is to improve the coordination of activities among the country so that we have something which incorporates the fact that the Amazon River begins in Peru. Many rivers begin, or the Negro River begins in Colombia. And they drain to Brazil. And Brazil exports water through the clouds to the Andes. So we're all connected. My question to you is how can we improve coordination and integration among Amazonian countries? That's a very, very good question. As a matter of fact, look at this coincidence. I am meeting your president tonight. And you know, we're going to meet in the apartment or, I don't know, in some place with President Trump. And I'm going to hand him a letter. Telling him that we need to push forward an idea called the AAA. The AAA is the Andes, the Amazon, and the Atlantic. And that's we have already identified. We need the Guyanas also and the part of Peru and part of Venezuela. But Brazil, I know there you have many NGOs there that are very, very excited about it. And yes, we need to coordinate any action because climate change doesn't know frontiers. Borders, species don't identify frontiers. That's why collaboration and we have a responsibility. Brazil, Colombia, Peru, the whole Amazon basin. We have a responsibility with the world. And so we have to, there is a specific plan that we are going to pursue of how to better protect the whole of the Amazon corridor, the AAA, and the different cultures. There's a lot of things that we have not discovered yet. We made a, we're making an experiment in Colombia. One of the dividends of peace is we now can go to many places that we could not go before. And we're doing a replica of the botanical expedition that we made 200 years ago with today's technology. And we are making 21 mini expeditions. We have already done, I think it's 11 or 12. And we have already discovered, Professor, more than 90 new species that were unknown to mankind. But there's a lot more. And if we collaborate, we can do, I don't know, we can discover many, many things that are there hidden in our jungles, in our richness. Because I consider our jungles part of our natural richness. And that we discovered and protected correctly everybody will win. Thank you, Jen. I slur from mediators beyond borders international. I commend you for the work you're doing and the excellent presentation. My question is, what role did the presence and involvement of women play in achieving the peace of court that you have been able to do in some of the work that you just described? Thank you for reminding me, because I know you had a panel before about women leadership. The peace process, the peace process has, for the first time ever, a special chapter that has to do with gender and the protection of the victims. The women are considered the victims of the victims. Because they are the ones who lost their kids, lost their husbands, got raped. They are the victims of the victims. So there is a special consideration in the post-conflict for the role of women in the creation, in the construction of the peace. Because they have more credibility than we do. They have suffered more than we have. And so this specific peace process has given women a special role in the construction of peace, a special leadership there, in order to be able to be more effective. We've reached the end of the hour. Let me, before finally thanking our wonderful speaker, make two quick announcements. There are a very, very few tickets left for Carnegie Hall this evening. If you want to go, you better get online or rush to the box office, because it's just a tiny number. It is your chance to see Yo-Yo Ma and other virtuoso artists. It's going to be absolutely a phenomenal evening. So if you can make it, please join. Second announcement is that tomorrow it's at the faculty house. We look forward to seeing all of you there. There are spectacular sessions. Let me close by mentioning that with all of this inspiration and great leadership, when we at the United Nations and the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network look to how to bring the SDGs throughout Latin America, we wanted to establish an SDG center of excellence for the Americas, and for Latin America in particular, and of course, the only place that the compelling place is in Bogota, in Colombia. So we will be launching an SDG center of excellence at Universidad de los Andes. And that will be early in 2018. We hope many of you will be involved. We anticipate absolutely thrilling new center of excellence that will attract people from all over the world and that we'll be able to share these ideas from all over the world. Mr. President. And remember, high goals, innovate, and persevere. There we are. Thank you so much. Wonderful. Thank you. Really wonderful. Bravo.