 The fundamental insight of the UN conference on human environment was that the global environment of the development of the child is must be addressed simultaneously. The UN conference on human environment institute was established in 1989 to make this a reality. SEI's creation was the initiative of the then Swedish minister for the environment, Begitta Dahl. SEI was introduced to function as a kind of primus motor in the international cooperation for sustainable development. It was the initiative to be a focal point for scientists from all over the world and also to inspire people to work with the environment and for the development of the technology to a sustainable technology. When I first arrived in Kenya to an area where I'd been told there was a problem of fuel would shortage I was just amazed because there were trees growing everywhere. The farm had its little clump of trees. Where is this fuel would problem? The problem was that the trees were cut down by the men to be sold at market or used for building. The women who needed wood for household tasks had to make long trips to collect whatever they could find. Working together with the local university SEI developed a special type of tree that provided plenty of wood for cooking and heating but which had a low trunk value because it was not suitable as a building material. To spread this knowledge SEI researchers used comics. It was just amazing that the project team would go out to villages and recruit local people to play roles. I think they had one or two key actors but mostly local people playing the roles to dramatize the story which culminated in the woman breaking up the husband's chair to use to cook his dinner. It was just hilarious and the crowds that gathered and watched it and the atmosphere that was developed there was amazing. By 1995 damage from acid rain had escalated to a level where urgent action was required. Tall chimneys pumped out pollutants that drifted hundreds of kilometers often over international borders. In fact it never really impacted on the areas very close to the power station because it went up and there was a kind of loop and then it went down further on. Soils acidified, eggs lost all signs of life. To work out why SEI created a simulation that showed how the wind carried emissions and damaged sensitive ecosystems. This model led to a European map of ecosystem sensitivity and influenced the first legislation on emission controls. What SEI did actually was to lay some of the foundations for the measurement of the effects of these harmful pollutants by establishing what are called critical loads, kind of thresholds for damage if you like. SEI played quite a key role in providing a lot of the evidence base for this international policy framework within the Convention on Long Range Transboundary Air Pollution. Named for the star that guided voyages through uncharted waters, the Polestar project explores alternative futures. The TELUS Institute and SEI's US Center developed Polestar as a tool for policymakers to explore interactions between environment and development. In 1997, UNEP published its first global environment outlook, the UN's one-stop assessment on the state of the planet's environment. The scenarios were prepared using SEI's Polestar model. The experience of designing Polestar established SEI as a leading expert in evidence-based assessment models. By 2008, over 150 countries would be using SEI's energy scenario software and SEI's water allocation and planning model would be applied in over 50 river basins in the world. SEI's Asia Center opened at the beginning of 2004. Ten months later, a huge tsunami devastated the region. In its aftermath, SEI worked in Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Thailand, helping vulnerable local communities with early warning systems and to recover sustainably. The research led to specific recommendations for the tourism sector so that the impact of future natural disasters is less severe. SEI is working with international economists and Chinese experts to identify practical ways to create a low-carbon economy that can act as a role model for the rest of Asia. The role of institutes like IID and SEI, which are policy research institutes, are to bring the fruits of good technical research in a manner that can be used by policymakers and not just in a utopian manner of having to change everything altogether overnight. In 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. I call upon the Peace Prize Laureate for 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The Prize Committee recognized eight SEI researchers in their citation. This was the fulfillment of the pioneering work on greenhouse gases initiated by Gordon Goodman, SEI's first executive director. Will those responsible for decisions in the field of climate change at the global level listen to the voice of science and knowledge, which is loud and clear? If they do so at Bali and beyond, then all my colleagues in the IPCC and those thousands toiling for the cause of science would feel doubly honored at the privilege I am receiving today on their behalf. Thank you very much. 2008 marked a new and exciting chapter in SEI's long-standing engagement in Africa with the opening of SEI's research center at the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. At the opening of the center, the Tanzanian Minister of State for Environment, Dr. Battilda Salah Burian, stressed that since SEI initiates, carries out and disseminates research in the environmental field, the physical presence of SEI in Africa, particularly in Tanzania, is of paramount importance. SEI's predecessor, the Bayer Institute, began analyzing the transition away from fossil fuels. SEI has continued this work by supporting access to modern energy services and the pragmatic use of bioenergy resources. In 2011, SEI was proud to co-host the third Nobel laureate symposium on global sustainability. The event gathered some 50 of the world's most renowned thinkers and experts on global sustainability to discuss new and innovative approaches to the way we govern the world's social and ecological systems. No one is better to represent that than Nobel laureates into a deeper integration between perhaps particularly the economic sciences, political sciences and natural sciences to offer solutions in the transformative processes towards a better world. The outcome of the third Nobel laureate symposium was the Stockholm memorandum which concluded that the planet has entered a new geological age, the Anthropocene. The memorandum, signed by 18 Nobel laureates, recommended a suite of urgent and far-reaching actions for decision-makers and societies to become active stewards of the planet for future generations. Fast action on short-lived climate pollutants such as black carbon, ground-level ozone and methane can have immediate climate, health and agricultural benefits. To tackle this challenge, the Climate and Clean Air Coalition was launched by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2012 to combat short-lived climate pollutants. Supported by the United Nations Environment Programme, the Coalition is the first effort to reduce short-lived climate pollutants as a collective challenge. SEI was instrumental in gathering the scientific evidence on the effects of short-lived climate pollutants and raising awareness of the benefits of taking immediate action. The Stockholm Environment Institute has collated the best available scientific information to feed into the scientific and policy debate. So we've been trying to hold meetings over the last six years to build the consensus around the issue. This led to UNEP, the United Nations Environment Programme, requesting the Stockholm Environment Institute to coordinate an integrated assessment of the problem. The two major reports that SEI helped coordinate have formed the basis for the Climate and Clean Air Coalition and their global initiatives to tackle short-lived climate pollutants. As part of the new climate economy, SEI has taken a leading role to look at how economic growth and climate action can go hand in hand. The first major report, Better Growth, Better Climate, was unveiled at UN headquarters in September 2014 in front of UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and government, business and finance leaders. Low-carbon energy is becoming a smart choice to meet energy demand. The investments needed to shift to a low-carbon economy are almost the same as those investments we will make anyway. The first main insight is that it is possible to combine economic growth and strong climate action. This will cost a little bit extra money as an upfront investment, but in the long term this will generate efficiency gains, savings and dynamic effects into the economy. We believe that will be more beneficial to economic growth. What is needed is political leadership in national nations and on the international global side. In some areas of the world, air pollution issues dominate and in other parts of the world, climate change issues dominate and the trick in all this and the big challenge is to bring these communities together. Smaller, poorer, least developed countries in sub-Saharan Africa and in countries like Bangladesh where they are not that well developed along that pathway so they can actually avoid going along a dirty fossil-fuel-based pathway and have a new paradigm for their energy and industrial pathways. I think our greatest challenge is to be part of that democratic dialogue to provide people with information about what are the options for the future and what we need to do as individuals, as citizens and how we try to influence policy decisions to change the course we are in. Order rise please. Thank you. Your Majesty, your Royal Highness, Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, dear colleagues, dear guests, warm welcome to SCI 25th anniversary symposium here in Stockholm. 25 years of bridging science and policy and finding solutions to contemporary and future problems. The seminar today is about stories. This is a bit controversial for being a science-based organization, but it's a very typical SCI. It's not just about science. It's about human dimensions. It's about making connections. It's about establishing and creating engagement. This requires stories, stories told by scientists. If we look back at the last 25 years, we can tell many different stories. We would probably get 7 billion of them if we are asking people around the world today. Has the last 25 years been successful? It depends very much who you are asking. I would like to start by saying that the last past 25 years have been amazing in many ways. We have made tremendous achievements as human beings. We have lifted billions of people out of poverty. More people today are educated. More people today are enjoying the realities of democracy. More people are living longer and are healthier despite what is also taking place in the world today in West Africa that we should not forget. But of course we can also start from another story and highlighting that some of these achievements have also come at a cost to society. To certain degrees, we still have inequalities between countries and within countries. We still have gender disparities. Not everyone is enjoying the fruits of democracy and participation because of poverty or because of your gender. We have environmental challenges, new types of environmental challenges when we have managed to solve some, even global challenges such as the ozone hole but also more local ones like acid rain or eutrophication in certain parts of the world. We have others coming up, one being of course climate change and maybe even more urgently for instance biodiversity degradation. 25 years ago is not a long time. Apaleo climatology is anything less than 10,000 years is basically nothing, it's a glimpse. The CO2 of the atmosphere will only be a spike and I'm sure also human impact on the climate will only be a spike in a geological perspective. But a lot of things have changed and in 1989 for instance we were only 5 billion people in this world. Today we are 7.2. So in the course of this organization's lifespan we have added 2.3 billion people. A few of them fortunately have selected to work with us. 1989 finally Europe really moved towards unification. The Berlin Wall fell in November. A democratically elected president Watzler Havel was chosen by its people in December 1989. This was the start of the collapse of one big empire, the Soviet Union. And this really did start in motion the expansion of the European Union. To become the union it is today with all its challenges, all its problems. Not agreeing on size of strawberries. But still being so important in building peace, prosperity, collaboration here in Europe. And also being a role model for other parts of the world. And not least being important in the sense of promoting scientific collaboration in Europe. Unheard of in the past. This was the reemergence of globalization when we finally broke down some of these walls that have been splitting us. A globalization which of course have still a lot of challenges. But has also established and created huge benefits to many people around the world. But not only Europe saw a lot of dramatic changes in 1989. In Brazil, one of the key countries today, we had the first democratically elected president in almost 30 years. In South Africa, the clerk was elected president and his government started at least the dismantling of the apartheid system. That was in 1989. We had the protests in China at Times Square in 1989. The politics in China may not have changed as much as they did in Soviet Union. But the economic development in China and still lifting people out of poverty has been tremendous since then. And China's GDP has grown from 2,000 billion yuan to 20,000 billion yuan today in just this short period of time. But there were small things happening in 1989 which later proved to become a revolutionary change. In 1989, a person whose name is Tim Berners-Lee. How many have heard about Tim Berners-Lee in this room? A few people over there. You use his invention every day. The World Wide Web was invented in 1989. Insert to improve communication in science. In terms of environment, the late 1980s was also a breaking point. Our common future was presented, sometimes called the Bruntland Report in 1987. Really coining sustainability as an issue. The Montreal Protocol was signed. The Montreal Protocol, which Kofi Annan said a few years back, perhaps the single most successful international agreement to date. Really reducing hazardous substances, destroying the ozone layer. Not the most successful environmental agreement, the most successful multilateral agreement yet. We had the first assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change in 1990. Really kicking off the science policy debate and discussion on climate. And we have yet a lot of work to do there. And of course in 1992 we had the Rio Conference. A conference not for the first time gathering thousands of people to really focus on sustainability. It was not just an environmental issue. It was bringing together environment, development and social issues. This was key and this was the environment in which SCI was formed. From the beginning getting into its gene, rapid transformation, having a capacity to follow what is taking place in the world and also being very much aware of the need to connect between different issues. Where are we now? Where are we heading in the future? Well, some of you know that one of my favorite quotes is from, unfortunately, but okay, a Dane. Sometimes we have to be more Scandinavian maybe. Nils Bohr stating that predictions are difficult, especially about the future. This is so true. We can of course, we must plan for the future, but we should not pretend that we can predict it. We must be open for changes. We must understand that when we are talking about the future, there is a major chance that we are wrong. That's painful if you are a scientist. I don't know how it is if you are a politician, but anyway. We will see a lot of different trends. I will not go into them today. Many of you in the room are aware of them. SCI, I feel, and being the head of this organization, and I'm really proud to be so, it's an amazing organization. We can brag today. It's okay. We are well prepared for this future, and you will see that through our stories today. My biggest frustration is the fact that only a very limited number of our scientists will present, unfortunately. Most of them are not even here today. They are out at our centers around the world, many of them following us on web stream or livecast. I would have loved to tell you more about the work we do in relation to global assessments, for instance, or on air pollution, where we are linking the global and the very local level on household indoor air pollution, or climate change, mitigation and adaptation, where we really progressively try to support communities around the world to adapt and to mitigate. Looking at low carbon trajectories in the world, the next generation of energy systems, understanding trade, how it impacts us and how it impacts other parts of the world, supply chains for companies, under climate change, what happens there. The groundbreaking work on sustainable sanitation, being one of the few organizations in the world, science-based, who are proud of being able to talk about shit. That's sanitation for you. You have to be able to speak the real language. I would have loved to tell you about Weep and Leap and other platforms we have used by hundreds of countries around the world to really support them in everyday planning related to water and energy, or we adapt, bringing together the experience of thousands of communities on climate adaptation, or on consumer and producer responsibilities and interrelationships, how you build sustainable neighborhoods in Hercaringan, for instance, in Stockholm. Geopolitical changes in China and how we are trying to understand the dynamics. I would have loved to tell you all about this, but you can read it on our webpage. I have to end up with a couple of thanks. It's actually quite important to do so. I would like to thank those visionary leaders that once established SCI. I'm not going to mention a lot of names, because if I do, then everybody will start to sit. Will he forget? I will. So, very few names. But I would like still to point out Begitta Dahl, sitting there. She was the first environment and energy minister, one of the first in the world. It's always a debate if it was the first or the second. But Begitta, it was her visionary, yes. It was her vision. What was really a vision was that initially the institute looking at technical solutions and so on, looking at our name, that was the focus. But really then understanding, well, we know, we need the governance around it. We need the management. We need to understand how people operate. That's the broad mandate of SCI. Thank you. I'd like to thank also the previous executive directors. I must say of this organization, Gordon Goodman, Mike Chadwick, Nick Sontak, Roger Kasperson. Roger, you're here somewhere. Roger Kasperson, who took over at the critical time. And Johan Rockström, who unfortunately is not here. He had other commitments today. I'm very sorry that this was the case. I'd also like to thank Lars Kristoffersson, who is also here somewhere, there, because he, yes, he stepped in when SCI had, you know, challenging transitions and so on, and so did Bert Boleen, who is unfortunately not with us today. Without you, SCI would not be what it is today. The Swedish government, I'd like to thank the Swedish government, and I'd like to thank the Swedish governments. Okay, this is the strength. All governments have been supporting SCI, and we are very, very pleased to have this very, very strong political support from the Swedish government. Without that support, SCI is not, would not be here today. We have representatives here today from the government, and we are very pleased, and we have also representatives from the previous government. We had an election, as you know, quite recently, and we are very happy that you are here today with us. I'd like to thank the, you know, hundreds of funders, but I'd like to mention the Swedish government again through FORMAS and SIDA. SIDA has also stood beside us all these years, extremely important for us. I'd like to thank all the thousands of partners we have in Sweden and around the world. We wouldn't be here if it wasn't for you. The leadership, the board, extremely important, very active, have contributed to the organization tremendously, and Chastindy Bliers has dedicated so much time as the chair of the board. We have Andreas Kahlgren here, we have Ingrid Pettersson, we have Astrid Söderberg-Wiedling representing the board here today. Amazing work from your side. And also, this is just management, a lot of my, you know, a lot of my colleagues talk about management, board and all these, where it's a science. Well, we have balanced that. So, I have my side, which is really the management of SEI, which I really love and I think is important, and then we have the science. The science advisory council, sitting on the third row there under the leadership of the research director, Mons Nilsson, the science advisory council who will challenge us and are challenging us, who will help bring us the next strategy. And always critically look at what we are doing. A warm thank you to you as well. Your Majesty and your Royal Highness, I would like to express also a very sincere thank you to both of you for being here today with us. It's not just about, you know, a symbol. As we have explained to many of our colleagues around the world and our partners, we are saying clearly that the head of state of this country and the Crown Princess has decided to spend a full day with SEI in our seminar. This is worth tremendous for us. And that leadership and that also dedication to environmental issues, development issues, is extraordinary important. So a warm applause to you. But I saved one. And I'm sorry, you know, this is not recording the protocol, I'm sure. You know, I don't know. It's okay. Protocol is there to be broken. The last group I would like to thank is actually the staff. The staff of this organization. It doesn't matter who we talk about, the management, the senior researchers, mid-level junior researchers, all those that take care of our finances, HR, who makes sure that our offices are running every single person among about 190 people are needed for SEI to be what it is today and be prepared for the future. I said to the others that SEI would not be what it is today without your support. It's very, very easy to just have one line for the staff. Without you SEI would not be. That's a simple statement. Today we also have the pleasure of launching a book. His Majesty as I have indicated has long lasting personal interest in environmental issues and sustainable development. An expression of this engagement is his initiative to invite a small group of scientists and decision makers in the form of royal colloquium and informal gathering to discuss and share insight and experiences over a wide field of issues. This has become a tradition and an important activity with a series of events during the last 20 years. The themes of the colloquium are very much in line with what we are working on in SEI and it has really been also presented widely through normally through the environmental journal Ambio. But this year a report from the Royal Colloquium 2013 has been published separately and this book is made generously available by his Majesty to all of the participants of the seminar today and you can pick it up because we want you to listen first of all to our seminar and don't start reading the book I'm sorry about that your Majesty but so you can pick it up on your way out on the desks there. Having said that I'd like to finalize by inviting His Majesty the King of Sweden to deliver a short opening note for us here today and invite you to stage. Thank you very much I hope you're going to enjoy the rest of the day. Your Royal Highness Excellence Ladies and gentlemen so let me once again start by congratulations to the Stock Environment Institute to its 24 years of anniversary and big jubilee. In the 1981 1987 the Swedish Parliament as we know decided to establish the Institute. At that time the leaders of the world discussed the need of a more sustainable development. The agreement was to focus on economic growth and prosperity for all people but also ensuring the sustainability for future generations three years later in 1992 these global aspirations were agreed on at the UN conference in Rio in Brazil and I definitely remember that meeting very well and appreciated very much that it was possible for me to attend that specific moment. I was once asked for a more balanced approach of environmental socially and economic dimensions of development and over the last decades there has been sustainable substantial progress in most parts of the world and an increased I would say awareness of climate issue. Today we are well aware of the many challenges confronting to us and through my travels around the world I often see the positive side of development but of course also the questions more specific for instance the Baltic sea or more distance regions such as the rainforest of course or the polar regions need our attention and care for continued well-being of our planet. The future is still in our hands and we must take the wrong leadership role. There are positive examples that show our capacity to find solutions and even achieve good results if we collaborate. I remember when the Stockholm Environment Institute was established one of the most urgent issue was the thinning of the ozone layer it was manifested through the so called ozone hole a strong international agreement based on science and collaboration between key political and other actors reversed the negative trends and today the so layer is recovering we need to find similar smart ways to address climate change next year countries will meet in Paris and hopefully hopefully sign the new climate agreement it is important that the political agreement are based available science. I look forward today's program and different discussions my wish for the day is to bring new ideas and insights on how we together can build a better world for the generations to come so thank you very much again and good luck thank you Your Majesty very much to the eclectic sparks for that piece of music music for a lost harmonium thank you very much Your Majesty, Your Royal Highness Excellencies, Friends my name is Rob Watt and today I'm your compare for this symposium my day job is communications director for SEI I'd like to show you this picture a little bit about what we're trying to talk about today this is a picture of Egypt the Nile and the Middle East it's a big picture it shows you development it shows you life but the thing about SEIs we're not just about the big picture seeing the interconnections between agriculture and energy we're also about grasping the detail and today's symposium is got a structure which I hope is going to allow you to learn a little bit more about our work and the first part the morning before lunch you're going to hear a little bit about the why of SEI why it is we carry out the sort of research the capacity development and the policy engagement that marks our our work you're also going to hear about the what what are the challenges, what are the problems perhaps what are some of the solutions to some of the trends that you've heard already described today but you're not going to hear everything about SEI I'm afraid we've only got a few hours so I do recommend that if you want to explore more about SEI that you take a look at our annual report interactive online and that's going to give you the opportunity to look through and explore the arts of our research and see the way in which the work that we do on climate change is connected to air quality at a local level as well as seeing that big picture today we've chosen a storytelling approach so you're going to hear vignettes now we all know of course that the plural of anecdote is not data but what we're doing is telling you these stories as a way in to understand to grasp to get a feel for the everyday experiences of many of the people that we are working with we're also doing this because I want you to hear the authentic voice of SEI and that means hearing from the researchers who go out into the field and carry out the research that marks our work our work is always done in partnership and in conversation and I'd like you to join that conversation here today as part of this symposium you can also participate using the Twitter hashtag SEI 25 but to get us started to catalyse our conversation I'm going to invite up four speakers from SEI who are going to talk about some of the main resource challenges that we're facing Tobi Gardner Louise Carlberg and Calla Haldig over to you Thanks Rob good morning in this first session you will hear from Calla, Louise, Tobi and I and we'll take you on a journey across four continents we'll each tell a story that connects global systems with local vulnerabilities about how it is these complex links and interconnectivity that define today's challenges our stories describe the world as it is, not necessarily as it should be we will hint at solutions that may come from unexpected places but we'll tell stories that are relevant to countries at all levels of development from those where poverty is most concentrated to emerging economic powers to rich countries like Sweden and it is in Sweden that we find ourselves today in such illustrious company with this table of random objects now I get to go first so I'm going to select this one after all we're here to celebrate 25 years of the Stockholm Environment Institute now where I'm from which is Scotland mostly we celebrate such special occasions with a drama of the good stuff and this is very good stuff the whiskey in this bottle is exactly the same age as the Stockholm Environment Institute it was distilled in February 1988 just as the ink was drying on the documents that would establish our institute now don't worry I'm not going to make lots of laboured metaphors about how SEI is like a good bottle of whiskey for example I won't dwell on the fact that both are made from simple quality ingredients I won't compare their maturity character or even their high value global brand and I certainly wouldn't as go to far as to say that what makes both great is that the people who created them had the wisdom to leave them well alone for several years to develop their own character and magic so if not this what are you thinking about whiskey this is the SEI we should be talking about gritty global environment development challenges this is Jenaba Jenaba works as a nanny and a cook for a family in the wealthy part of Dakar the capital of Senegal she's fairly typical of Senegal and indeed Africa's growing middle class Jenaba works very long hard days at the end of her day she goes from the houses across town to the home she shares with her sister and her nieces and her auntie she's tired when she gets home she doesn't have the time or energy to prepare the traditional serials of Senegal, Sorghum and Millet every day Jenaba eats rice rice is convenient to store and it's quick and easy to cook and that's why it makes up around a third of the daily calorific intake of the average person in Senegal Jenaba eats imported rice mostly broken fragrant rice from Thailand some of it from Vietnam imported rice is of a higher quality but the same price as the small amount of locally produced rice that makes it onto the market in Dakar but pretty much everybody in Dakar eats imported rice every single day now I wonder how much of your monthly income do you spend on food if you're anything like me you might struggle to answer that question accurately if you're anything like the average swede you will spend around 12% of your monthly income on food in the US the number is below 7% Jenaba knows exactly how much of her money she spends on food each month and it's over 30% she knows the exact price of rice each week as well and the changes can make a big difference so that's why the events of 2008 and 2009 had such a huge impact on Jenaba and her family now let's zoom out of Senegal for a while and fly across to India it's 2008 and poor rice harvests are predicted the government has to respond rice prices are highly political in India as they are in Senegal and they impose an export ban on rice now this export ban coupled with various other factors kick starts a chain reaction of events worldwide rice prices go up middle income countries panic by rice at extremely high prices there is a flurry of trade measures from both exporting and importing countries and the result is a global rice crisis now zoom back down into Senegal as a low income highly import dependent country there was little the Senegalese government could do to cushion consumers from the effects of these global price increases at the market where Jenaba does her weekly shop the rice price was over 120% higher than it normally is now what does the family who spend around a third of their income on food do when the price of their staple commodity more than doubles Jenaba took to the streets in protest there were even riots in Dakar as the result of a chain of events that had started half the world away climate change threatens rice farming in the key exporting producing countries mostly in Asia and if the global trade system continues to operate as it does today more intense and more frequent droughts are very likely to create more of the global price that we saw in 2008 and 9 now we call this an indirect impact of climate change people and governments face risks that are the result of climate change somewhere else in the world but very few governments are actively planning to adapt to these indirect impacts there are a number of reasons for this but they frequently lack the expertise or the decision making frameworks to consider complex trans boundary risks so how is a country like Senegal supposed to prepare for the indirect impacts of climate change it may surprise some of you to learn that the producers of single malt whisky are also vulnerable to the impacts of climate change on their supply chain the new bottles of Bruchladi proudly proclaim the fact that they are built from 100% Scottish barley that's part of their brand but more than once in recent years the Scottish barley harvests have been poor but the whisky companies were ready, they were prepared and they've sourced high grade malting barley from countries outside Scotland when they've needed to including Sweden actually the Bruchladi distillery where this whisky comes from like most of the distilleries in Scotland now are owned by big global food and drink companies these companies have supply chains that cross borders around the world and they're investing heavily in developing and emerging countries around the world and as food and drinks companies they rely on water and agricultural produce and this puts them at the forefront of climate impacts both today and in the future for these companies, climate risks are real business risks and so they apply their expertise and their risk management processes to assess and understand complex transboundary risks now we think that governments can learn to address indirect impacts by learning from experiences of multinational corporations furthermore these companies will be key stakeholders and agents in deciding how climate risks cross borders both through trade but in other ways as well so it's essential to understand how these companies plan to respond to these climate risks and how their responses may affect people in vulnerable countries such as Senegal for example and so that is why we are entering partnerships with global food and drink companies to learn and transfer knowledge about how they deal with uncertainty and risk in complex systems so while we hope in 25 years to still be enjoying a drama brucladi at SEI's 50th anniversary and I'm sure we will given the resource and power that lies with the decision makers who own these companies what we really hope is that countries like Senegal have used the best available methods to assess the risks they face and to develop strategies to cope with their own supply chain risks and we hope that people like Genaba have not had to take to the streets in protest again now to introduce you to more of the objects on this table let's get over to my friend and colleague Toby Gardner Toby will take us west and south to Latin America where after the protests of Genaba on the street in Senegal he was arriving to learn the local implications of global complex systems somewhere deep in the Amazon Thank you Magnus I would like to continue the theme that Magnus has started to unveil for us of how people in far-flung corners of the world are connected in profound ways and how those connections can have huge implications on the lives of millions around the world and the fate of our increasingly fragile planet I would like to take us as Magnus has said to Brazil to the ancient city of Santarém nestled in the heart of the Amazon where the crystal waters of the Tapajós river meet the banks of the mighty Amazon itself we find the present day city of Santarém Santarém is one of the oldest is home to one of the oldest pre-Columbian civilizations known to mankind in the time since the famous Spanish explorer Francisco Oriana first passed through in 1452 this region has experienced traumatic changes but those changes pale into comparison with what has happened in the last two decades alone since the arrival of modern agriculture Santarém today is a world of contrasting differences contrasting worlds on the one hand it's easy to come across many small holder farmers who continue to till the fields growing manioc and other crops for their subsistence in the same way using hose not the similar to this that they have for generations in neighbouring fields it's easy to find a soy farmer who's come perhaps recently from Uruguay or Argentina half a continent away and who shares little more with the manioc farmer whom he's a neighbour with than a common language yet the soybean farmer is the driving and directing his tractor using the latest global positioning system targeting the input of the latest fertilizers and pesticides to his fields it was to this environment that I arrived on the 9th of January 2009 to embark on a wildly ambitious project with my Brazilian colleagues our intention was to marshal a small army of researchers and work in any way we could with the local farming community with the local government with NGOs to understand some of the environmental and social implications of what have become in really only a few short years one of the most infamous agricultural frontiers in the world and it's hard to try and conceptualize what that might mean mechanization only arrived in Santarang in 1999 a mere decade before I first set foot there at that time soy occupied an area smaller than one single football field today soy occupies an area in Santarang larger than all major league football fields in the world combined and three the original experience perhaps its most dramatic lurch in fate and that's when a new port was built in the city of Santarang to export soy and other commodities to the insatiable customers in North America China and here in Europe this event gave rise to perhaps one of the most visible environmental campaigns that Brazil has ever seen as well as leading famously to a moratorium on the purchase of soy that had been recently deforested this event also gave rise to a wall of hostility and distrust amongst the local farming community of anybody who was arriving in the area with any intention to work or address environmental issues just exactly the time that we were trying to do the same thing it was unfortunate for me that I bore a striking resemblance to a tall-blonde Dutch campaigner who only a few years before had arrived in the region to tell the Brazilian soy farmers in their own country to go home as a consequence I had it coming it was only after countless nights dark long nights in farmyard barns surrounded by pretty grim-faced farmers listening to my very patient colleague Joyce from the Brazil's Ag Cultural Research Institute try and persuade them that not all gringos were bad news and it also helped that in playing pool with the wealthiest cattle farmer in the region I allowed him to beat me convincingly if it is hard to imagine how a landscape like Santareng has changed so dramatically in the last few years it is even harder to imagine the consequences of these changes for the people that live there expectation born from countless stories of tragic human suffering in agricultural frontiers around the world leads us to think that this outcome is not attractive that it is almost impossible for the most vulnerable to keep up with the race when you experience such rapid technological change poor small-holder farmers are often out-competed as the prices of soy and other commodities saw the price of land goes up and they are displaced to the periphery with bloated, chaotic and often violent tropical cities however in my time in Santareng in other parts of Brazil after living and working there for a few years speaking with the poorest and the richest farmers other more positive and more surprising narratives began to emerge one of the most vivid of which occurred only this April when I returned with colleagues to try and share some of the results of our project that we just did to visit a small-holder farmer who's been a long friend of our project a small-holder who grows manioc and he lives he's a small farmer but he's also the charismatic president of, I have to share the name, the Charmungli named small micro and mini farmers association of the kilometer community of the kilometer 115 on the Santareng Queer Bar Highway and they even have an acronym for that and he bides his time between growing manioc and organizing literally countless anyone who knows Brazil will know that their social movements are very strong countless community initiatives and it was in the midst of one of these initiatives their community is quite literally as this dramatic photograph shows at the end of the road this is the end of the tarmac in a couple of years ago on the highway cutting into the Amazon and it was in the midst of one of those initiatives that we encountered him listening and encouraging his neighbors to pay attention to a local extension worker who he had invited to the community to share the benefits of growing a great diversity of fruit and vegetables this wasn't particularly surprising it was heartening but not particularly surprising what was surprising and you can see the chap in the middle here with the hat also leaning on a pretty similar hoe to this one was a soy farmer Silmario also whom I know quite well from the south of Brazil a place where the culture and development status is much similar to here in Europe than it is to the north of the Amazon and what should have been a perfectly normal site two neighbors working together on a community project was actually something a signal of something quite remarkable it was a signal that these two men didn't necessarily live despite the few similarities in their origins in completely incompatible and isolated worlds in fact, their quite deep friendship is based on a system of technology transfer and knowledge sharing that has allowed, for example Isvaldo to hire Mario's tractor take his fruits to market that pays for his daughter to go to secondary school in Santoreng and it also at the same time introduced Mario to some of the bewildering diversity of nutritious fruits and vegetables that the region is so famous for the relationship is mutually beneficial so my experiences in Santoreng have taught me many things they've taught me as Rob told us at the start of today that the world is not always as we think it is sadly it's not always as we'd like it to be but it also taught me that it is not always as we fear it must be development options are not necessarily good or bad black or white it's not the case of course that the future of the Amazon is in the hands of either the small holders or the soybean farmers the challenge is to identify the benefits that both can bring and the ways in which we can harness that diversity for the sustainable development of the region as a whole so with that I would like us now to move east to Ethiopia and allow Louise to continue this journey of how we can explore coupled environment development problems and how by untangling some of this complexity we start to envisage more sustainable trajectories for the future thank you thank you very much Tobi this will not only be a journey across the Atlantic it will actually also be a journey in time in 1984 when I was 10 years old I remember the horrific pictures on television of the famine in Ethiopia I've carried this story with me and I've continued to ask myself the same questions that I asked myself then why did this happen and of course how can it be prevented from happening again now some 30 years later I find myself working in Ethiopia facilitating dialogue among stakeholders working with food energy water and environmental issues and for which I've been rewarded this beautiful traditional Ethiopian dress so those of you sitting on the front row here have probably spotted that I have not yet managed to buy myself a pair of traditional Ethiopian shoes something I obviously will have to do next time I go there now once in the field when I was out let's see if I can get the technology to work there we go out in one of the field trips up in the highlands of Ethiopia in the Amara region I took this photograph of this young girl maybe she is around 10 years of age she's a farmer's girl she has gone to fetch water and those of you who've got good eyes maybe you can see that she's also carrying her little brother or sister on her back two little feet sticking out so let's imagine what will her life be like in 30 years time today well Ethiopia has embarked on a journey towards becoming a mid-level economy by 2025 you know that's just basically around the corner just over 10 years from now very ambitious plans and actually when you go to Ethiopia you feel this bubbling bursting sense of activity in the country they're building new roads they're building houses they're building a lot of infrastructure they're building homes for irrigation purposes and for hydropower the population is also expanding rapidly so all in all it looks very promising for this young farmer's girl however as always the devil is in the details so jointly with partners and stakeholders we started looking at different resources underpinning this development first of all we started looking at water water that is required to transform the whole agriculture which is today basically subsystems farming into modernized agriculture water is key to underpin this process by irrigation of course equally water is required for the energy systems transition towards electricity in this case hydropower production and as we all know water is needed to sustain ecosystem services in lakes and rivers so what we found was that when we started adding up the water needs for energy for agriculture and for ecosystems unfortunately during certain periods of time the needs are greater than availabilities equally we started looking at biomass human needs for biomass so what do we require biomass for well obviously we need biomass to eat but that's just actually a tiny little fraction of the biomass that we require another large share is fodder for livestock and Ethiopia has got a rather large livestock population but also biomass is required for fuel and as a matter of fact in most sub-Saharan African countries the energy sectors are more than 80% based on biomass more than 80% based on biomass that's quite a lot of biomass so of course that's what we in Sweden call biofuels these days right but in the Ethiopian context what we talking about here is wood leaves, twigs, branches dried cow dung, crop residues basically all types of biomass that you can find that you can feed into a cook stove and burn and we will hear a lot more about that in the next session actually so again we started looking at the different human needs for biomass and compare that to the biomass available in other words the increment of biomass that's grown every year in all ecosystems and to our surprise we found that the biomass needs today is more or less in the same order of magnitude as biomass needs as biomass availability this is clearly not sustainable and it is quite evident that Ethiopia is beginning to hit the biomass ceiling now how do we resolve these outstanding dilemmas pertaining to resource scarcity I would say that the solution definitely does not lie with me or I would argue not with anybody of us in this room either for that matter perhaps or I would argue that the solution lies with this young girl and her 80 were actually to be 120 million compatriots to try and carve out an agreeable development trajectory taking into account all the different prioritizations making these prioritizations but equally implementing new technical innovations and new policies so that the famine that we experienced in 1984 will have made it into the history books for good without ever risking escaping those history books again so with this story from Ethiopia we will now continue our journey east Kalle will tell us a story from China which is already experiencing life as a mid-level economy this is his story thanks a lot thanks a lot Ruiz when the global carbon project released the 2013 carbon emission figures just a month ago I think maybe the most significant change was the fact that China had overtaken the Europe or EU on per capita carbon dioxide emissions so when the average Chinese emits more carbon than the average European that is changing the way we look upon responsibilities for climate change it's a significant change but it also focus the question was on how far could we demand developing country to carry the responsibility for emissions that are actually taking place elsewhere through trade these discussions about responsibility are very heated, very emotional and it's enough to pick up a few newspapers to see quite divergent views here's the Times British magazine or newspaper the claims that China's drive for wealth means the end for low carbon dreams wow at the other end of the spectrum other well-known British publication The Guardian we'll see if we find the article carbon dioxide emissions are being outsourced by rich countries to the rising economies so who is right and who is responsible let's explore some of the facts behind this we start by the Times argument it's a stark argument but one that in fact is quite valid this is China's carbon dioxide emissions since 1990 and you see how they picked up speed going through the roof literally in this millennium so in this millennium China is the source for more than two thirds of the additional carbon dioxide emissions in the world but in fact this is just a reflection of economic growth so exponential economic growth has led to carbon emissions and other pressures on the environment what's interesting with this picture apart from the exponential growth and that it's clearly unsustainable is this line something happened around 2002 China joined the WTO now the other article well it holds on water as well claiming that it's consumption in the rich world that causes emissions in the poor world now emissions along supply chains has grown rapidly in the last 15 years and the main source of carbon in production is China the main consumers are the US and Europe now these are facts about the deeper mechanisms that contribute to the changes that bind together so how is this happening around the supply chains I will take you on a journey to a place that has played a pivotal role in changing the relations between global production and consumption and in fact the most heavy manufacturing is the most dramatic where the most dramatic change has occurred in China's Hebei province Tansheng alone produces more steel than the entire United States this is Zhang Yulin and her husband in front of what used to be the fruit orchard 2010 the pears here were so blackened that they couldn't wash off the soup and they tasted awfully 2011 the trees didn't bear any more fruit last year the orchard was confiscated by the local government to pave the way for more heavy manufacturing Zhang Yulin has lost hope since nothing can grow anymore all the young people have no option but to take jobs in the heavy manufacturing industry her daughter works long days at one of the local steel mills she takes care of the grandson who is four years old and has seen blue sky Tansheng is at the heart of a giant oh sorry Tansheng is at the heart of a giant global transition that has taken place only since the turn of the millennium a transition that most of us do not really know about during this period China has grown into the world's major supplier of heavy manufacturers such as steel this is global steel production since 2000 until 2012 it has doubled from 800 million tons to 1600 million tons but if you take away China the production has been level all the increase in global production has come from China in these 15 years 2003 China was the world's major importer just as China had joined the WTO only four years later China was the world's major exporter of steel within China one region stands out it's the Hebei province where Changyulin has fruit orchards that do not carry any fruit anymore Hebei province produces one eighth of global steel today one eighth so how can this have happened what are the drivers between this matchless growth of global capacity is it a pull of insatiable demands consumption from rich countries or are there other factors here and I would say that what's happening in China is much more akin to the great leap forward Mao Zedong's mad dash in the late 1950s to try to overtake the US and Europe in steel production the difference is this time China managed they are at the top of the world in steel production and many other lines of production similarities as well the environment of the havoc it's brought along or the fact that this drive is all about policy and investments it's very little to do with the pull of markets what's happened since China actually joined WTO is that massive subsidies have gone into heavy manufacturing in China and that has propelled this enormous growth so if we see what happened from the 2000 until 2007 the years just after China's WTO accession production tripled export grew tenfold subsidies grew 30 times and of course China had been a main producer also without these subsidies but nothing compared to these numbers simple economics tell us what has this led to well of course heavy subsidies lead to over production and over capacity 2012 2013 last year it was reckoned that global over capacity in steel production was around 300 million tons that's around a fifth of global production 200 million of those tons were in China now the Chinese iron and steel association themselves say that things have run beyond imagination they now think that China's over capacity is 300 million tons that's 40% of China's entire steel production it's five times their export so where does this lead us this is of course a type of development that has this kind of development has one hand caused the world to be flooded by cheap steel and for us all to consume too much it also created environmental havoc in China and it put enormous extra and unnecessary pressure on the global climate so this is also what is lying behind when Chinese Premier Li Keqiang the national people's congress this spring declared war on pollution this is so much more than just trying to deal with the local pollution the bottom line here is about China's economy so how to deal with the over capacity in major sectors in which China has invested only the last 15 years it was particularly troublesome if you look at profit margins in these sectors this is steel making it's been slumping all since 2003 onwards and today Chinese steel manufacturers are running red numbers accumulating billions and billions of dollars of losses and same goes for other sectors that are using a lot of steel such as sea ship building now so this is the bottom line the policy in China today is very much one that is what we talked about in the new climate economy that combines saving the economy and saving the climate the question is will they manage this so where does where do these stories bring us they're quite disparate they're all from all across the world but I think there is a common thread and it is that consumption and the way things are produced connect people and geographies it links up the act of consuming things whether it's out of gluttony or out of the wish to buy into new smart energy and climate efficient devices it connects that consumption with the effects of production, job opportunities and pollution and in fact a considerable share of the global increases in pressures of the environment including the climate have emerged long global supply chains and the way the global patterns of consumption and production are changing now it's redrawn the map in a way that blurs the idea of national borders and shapes new regional patterns it's globalization and as the causal links between demand and supply to an increasing extent are no longer within national borders but who is responsible that is getting increasingly ambiguous and in an increasingly interconnected world the surprising interconnections and interdependences will be more and more important for us to understand and navigate the future thanks a lot thank you very much Kalle, Magnus, Toby and Louise we're shortly going to invite up another for speakers to tell you again for rather different stories and they're going to move you on from understanding about the interconnections and the positive aspects of knowledge transfer and technology to also the negative sides increased pollution for example and indirect impacts of things like climate change and talk at a little bit more specific level the experience of individuals so I'm going to invite up now also Johanna Sun Fiona Lam Caroline O'Chung and Kevin Hicks to join me here over to you also thank you it's on it's working, hello everyone I'm going to talk about early in the morning on the November 8th 2013 one of the greatest tropical cyclones ever recorded hit the Philippines it was the Typhoon Haiyan or Yolanda and people caught in the middle of this storm thought that this was the end of the world and for some people it was 6300 people died an enormous storm surge as you can see here came in about 5 meters high and that was the biggest cause of death in the hardest hit town of Tacloban where many coastal communities were wiped out at SCI we do research on early warning systems and on risk reduction and we ask ourselves were the people here warned did they hear the warning and yes they were 6 days before the typhoon hit Tacloban there was a national television warning went out warning people about an exceptionally strong typhoon and a 7 meter high storm surge people had enough time to repair and to evacuate but they didn't so why in Tacloban about 15 000 people out of the 200 000 residents did seek shelters the rest stayed in their houses so you can imagine the Philippines is not used to storm surges the word storm surge doesn't exist in the Filipino language survivors were saying that if they would have been warned about a tsunami they would have known what to do and what to expect now they didn't understand what grave threat they were facing so is it about words and language that we are working on here yes partly but there's more to it than that I went to the Philippines in January this year and I heard about a village where an entire island where 1000 people had evacuated the entire island so how come I interviewed the mayor of this island Alfredo Aquiano here a scene on the picture and he told me about this his municipality's Purok system that he started establishing in 2004 and now he's got about 120 Puroks in his municipality the Puroks build on traditional structures they are community organizations they serve the community 24 hours, 7 days a week there is a chairman there is several committees which are assigned to health education solid waste management and etc. what the community feels as the biggest priority it's a micro governance system and people these Puroks not only educate people on these issues but most important of all they bring people together and they build trust in the community Puroks in this way build resilience which was very important on this day in November so people could anticipate the threat, they could respond properly and they could evacuate and then because of a build up capital system they have means to rebuild their houses again this is a very interesting example for SCI as we study urban resilience and Alfredo Aquiano is now trying to transfer this Purok system into the nearby Cebu city the Philippines second largest urban town urban center and this means a way to scale up ways of community resilience at an urban scale our society is growing very much our cities are growing very much at the coastal coastal areas are growing people move in sometimes even encouraged by the governments we have to learn to adapt more and more to live with climate variability and change our research tells us that we need to put people more in the center than we have done before in this area technically advanced systems for early warnings are crucial but they can only be effective if people have the chance to respond to them in the in the proper way for that you need to build community capacity they need to be aware and you have to involve them in the planning of these systems often they are planned by experts far away offices community resilience is also important for us in our high income societies where we need to figure out how we're going to solve the urbanization of this world how are we going to solve the absolute paving of our cities that actually creates disasters creates flooding from just a normal rainfall we have to plan better we have to involve nature nature services better and we have to start in time right now we are ourselves into vulnerability we have to start in time before we create more disasters and this thing about risks and risk behavior humans juggle so many different risks in life and we have different priorities many will risk a lot for their livelihood for economic opportunity and to reduce risks and not create more disasters we need to learn more and start understanding why people take the decisions and priorities they do and Fiona is now going to talk more about the importance of understanding these factors influencing people's behavior actors thank you so you will have seen from the program in front of you what a wide range of expertise we have at SEI and quite often at SEI I'm referred to as an expert on household energy or an expert on cookstores and this can feel really nice it's really nice to feel like an expert somewhat of an authority on a subject area you have accumulated some knowledge on a topic and that's great I've experienced years that are feeling less and less comfortable with this label and in preparing for today's talk I tried to pinpoint when exactly this started happening for me and I realized it was during a series of trips to India over the last couple of years where we've been doing some research on household cooking practices and the barriers that households face in trying to switch from traditional or smoky cookstores to an improved cleaner healthier stove like this nice shiny one here in the picture but households aren't making the switch they're just not doing it and even when stoves are being given out for free it's not happening and sure I understand the literature I know the numbers and the statistics but these trips to India sort of opened my eyes a bit and made me realize that actually being an expert goes far beyond this that it's not enough to know the numbers and to know the literature so I went to a village in Haryana in northern India to speak to some women and I met these women here amongst others and they really changed the way that I see this issue and most importantly changed the way that I would ask questions around this issue we were told that in this village it's quite common that people use cow dung to cook with so dried out cow dung and I thought hmm okay in the literature cow dung is often sort of the fuel of last resort it's a fuel that you use when you maybe don't have any other choice it produces very toxic smoke so I was a little bit surprised by this so walking through the village I was looking around and I noticed that most people in their in their front yards they had a pile of firewood so we were kind of interested and it was lunchtime so we were invited into one of these court yards to watch when these women here were cooking and straight away I noticed that they were cooking roti which is this round bread you see here it's a local staple flat bread they were using cow dung you can see on the bottom of the picture there and I said wait a minute I asked them you know you all have firewood here in your court yard they were using, continuing to use cow dung and they started laughing at me and they said well first of all we're using both fuels at the same time we're using them in tandem if we only cooked with firewood we would not be able to make our roti it would burn by using cow dung it allows us to slow down the fire so that we can bake the bread so I thought this was really really interesting and I watched them and sure enough they had perfected a way of doing this so it was almost effortless and within 10 minutes there was a pile of delicious smelling roti there in front of us so I was really so I said okay can I try making some roti on your stove please and they sort of smiled at each other and handed me the pan and handed me a small piece of dough which I made into a sort of round shape just like they had done and I put it on to the frying pan just like they did and then I started to try and do two things at once I started to try and fry the bread and put the firewood in to speed up the flame just the way they did and sparks went everywhere and smoke went everywhere and there was a lot of coughing and a lot of laughing and these women politely took the frying pan away from me and needless to say nobody really felt like eating my roti at lunch I was stuck with that so so then I realized I'm not an expert on cooking in Haryana far from it actually and over lunch I was curious I asked them would you like to have a cleaner cooking stove more efficient stove that maybe produced a bit less smoke and everyone said yes we would really like to have that oh great I thought okay what would that look like do you think and I have my pen and my paper ready but there was silence nobody could really answer that question and after lunch I asked if I could see inside their house if I could walk around and have a look inside another small kitchen area and I just kept finding stoves cook stoves everywhere this family had made from mud to traditional chula cook stoves the one in the picture here and one larger one outside and then I came across a gas cooking stove inside of course they said we can't cook everything using just one stove we need an extra stove so that we can cook different things at the same time we need a larger one outside to warm up our animal feed we need our gas stove so that we can make tea if somebody drops in unexpectedly and then I thought that actually makes sense I couldn't cook all my food on a microwave we all have many different things in our kitchen that we're using for cooking then I realized they're the experts here I'm not the expert at all they understand what's going on in this context the problem is that the information that these cook stove users hold is extremely difficult to get at it has to do with culture it has to do with taste aesthetic appeal emotion, psychology which even if we're conscious of them they're really really difficult if not impossible to verbalize especially not in front of a complete stranger and I think running through survey questions in a more quantitative manner will get you part of the way it's important it might tell you what sort of efficiency an improved cook stove needs to have or how much less smoke it needs to produce but it will not tell you whether or not the person is going to use the cook stove at the end of the day and that's the really crucial bit in many ways that's the missing link so if they the stove users if they're the experts what's our role as researchers well maybe our role perhaps is to try to come up with innovative ways methods to support end users in expressing this very difficult to get at information methods that could perhaps allow us to stand in other people's shoes and see the world from their perspective and understand their needs and preferences and that's exactly what our initiative on behavior and choice which you'll hear a bit about later is aiming to do and once again it feels really nice to be the expert so wouldn't it be nice if we could somehow flip the situation around so that these end users become the experts actually and that we put them in the driving seat a little bit more so that they're at the same time sort of co-designing solutions to the problems that they themselves have helped to diagnose so now Caroline is my colleague here another expert on household energy and cook stoves is going to talk a little bit about what can happen when we don't take the full context and background into consideration thank you so I'll pick on from the point Fiona has raised that if they are the experts and we don't get to talk to them or haven't devised a better method of getting into their head and talking to them how much are we missing and I have some evidence to share on this from a study that I did in Kenya so in the rural setting where 90% of the households were using biomass for cooking which is not unique for the setting you have 3 billion people in the world who have no access to modern energy and cook with biomass and in the setting they were also using kerosene for lighting so in simple tin lamps and again this is not unique to the setting they are 1.2 billion people without access to electricity and burn these lamps as they are mode of lighting so in this study I was evaluating the effectiveness of an improved stove design that was meant to make the lives of this community better because cooking on open fire leads to so much smoke and this smoke is one of the leading risk factors for disease and women and children are especially the most vulnerable so in the study I was comparing the situation before when people had the traditional stove I hope I can show it here so this is the traditional three stone fire so I was comparing this situation to the situation afterwards the new stove had been introduced so this is a picture of a typical kitchen in the setting and as you can see there is a limited ventilation so just a small hole on the wall to let in the light and this is the traditional three stone stove you can see the open flames that come out of it when wood is burning and now this was the situation afterwards so the new stove had been introduced and I've shown this picture around before and one question people have asked me is why is the lamp on was this study done were you visiting the households at night and my answer is no of course the study was done during the day and a bright tropical sunshine so then why do we have the lamp on so what happened is that with the introduction of this new stove the stove performed its job so well it fully enclosed the flames from the open fire and with that then you expect less smoke and better help for the families living in the households but then in addition the the traditional open fire in addition to serving cooking needs it was actually also providing light so when you introduce when an intervention was introduced that encloses the fire then the rooms were suddenly dark and people had to light lamps each time they were cooking and this kind of situation was into several problems where you have the open fire replaced with an improved stove but then with people lighting the lamps there are several things about this lamp one is that up to 10% of the kerosene poured in this lamp is converted into black carbon which is a health risk for the households but also contributes to global climate change and then a lot of household income goes towards kerosene purchase so up to 20% of the income is spent purchasing kerosene so where people have to burn lamps for longer hours then even the economic resources get depleted as well and if you have type of intervention then of course people are also less likely to use the stove not because they like their traditional way of cooking but because this new device is just inappropriate for the setting so really the main lesson that I saw from this is that while it's easy for us and often as researchers or development actors we tend to focus on a single problem a single solution while ignoring all the other factors around us or treating them as something that belongs or a problem that's best tackled by somebody else but enough of the issues you find are very interconnected and intertwined and so there's a need to sort of look at a household or even a kitchen as a system and try to see how the different variables within it interconnect and if we talk to these local experts then we get to learn more that several issues that go on are very interconnected in ways that we haven't considered before so I'll leave it now to Kevin to tell us how this holistic system would actually work in practice. Thank you very much Caroline. So my story starts when I was in a meeting in a conference an international conference in Cape Town in South Africa and a local speaker was talking to the audience about cook stove interventions I'm not an expert on cook stoves by the way I like scaling things up and moving science to policy and this lady said just like my fellow presenters said people bring these cook stoves and they really think that they have a solution and they're really well meaning and they want to have this solution she said you think about your homes and this is my home and they say you think about your home how many cooking appliances have you got and I thought about two but you can see there's many, many different cooking appliances in a normal UK kitchen and the point is that as we've heard whatever our level of development we are able to adapt to our circumstances and we've heard from Fiona how elegantly managed slow cooking and fast cooking and the point is that these people are happy and sometimes even happier than those when we're cooking but so there is a problem now the problem is what the World Health Organization called the forgotten three billion and this is what we've heard about from Ethiopia and from these other countries 80% of people are relying on biomass which is cow dung wood or crop residues or coal and the numbers are staggering so three billion people of our seven billion population almost half of us are cooking like this and it's often in indoor situations and there's gender and equity issues women and children being exposed to high concentrations of these particles and four million people a year die prematurely because of the exposure four million 50% of five year olds that die of pneumonia they die because of exposure to this particulate matter black carbon search which you'll hear about this afternoon from these type of fires and 3.8 million people die from what we call non-communicable diseases like heart disease so those are the numbers what can we do and this issue has been around before SEI with the Bayer Institute and the Kenya Wood Stove Fuel Wood project and then we had the health issue really came on board in the 90s and the 2000s there was a lot of push to try and solve this problem but still it wasn't solved and now we're lucky to have Professor Ramanathan with us today and he's going to tell you about black carbon and how that's actually linked to climate change so these people are actually contributing to climate change and so there's many good reasons for why development community and donors should make an intervention in these situations, there's many good reasons but how can we help them so the first thing is as I also said people have to be very aware of the risk that they're facing in their everyday lives and it's not always apparent to people what the risk is so these people are very happily cooking and a lot of them don't know the damage that it's doing to their lungs and their well-being so there's an awareness thing but we know it's not enough because we saw the happy cooking for centuries people have been fascinated by this film this afternoon we like fire and it's very useful in our lives and there's always going to be fire Oscar Wilde famously says moderation in all things, even moderation and the Swedes you say lagom which is not too much, not too little so fire is always going to be there but how can we help these people so I want to show you an elegant solution which has been taken up in many places around the world which touches on a lot of the issues that we face today and this is a somewhere I came across when I was at a meeting in Uganda and this is the shit here in this pot that's the shit that that Johan was telling us about so basically and I live in Yorkshire where there's muck there's brass so where there's shit there's biogas so what you do is this lady has a small holding she's got five or six cattle that goes into that pot and it's called an anaerobic digester you can also put food waste in there and you can also put human waste in there so it's linked to a lot of big development issues and sustainable development goals that are emerging there's a huge amount of linkages here so they produce the biogas and you can see that the lady haven't been able to cook in her kitchen on biogas stove and she's not exposed to all that smoke now the really interesting thing about this slide lady in the kitchen is not actually the lady or the woman who owns the farmstead the woman who owns the farmstead is somewhere else doing another job and she has employed this woman to look after her farmstead in the daytime and she's also sent four of her children to university so this is a type of system that really works at the community level and there are some success stories around the world of scaling it up most notably in China but in Nepal biogas at different scales this local scale but also bigger scales when you have more livestock rearing operations going on and it's not the answer obviously but it's part of the type of solutions we need so I'd just like to finish by saying I'm interested in scaling up and linking local to regional to global and one of the really exciting things for me in the recent years is the formation of this climate and clean air coalition that we've heard about of which Sweden was one of the founding members and the reason why this is exciting is it's got complementary actions to climate change but it's a voluntary it's a voluntary organisation so there's many countries have signed up to it now and almost 40 countries have signed up to this coalition and behind it SAI helps coordinate the project that put these 16 measures on the table that were proven measures that had already been used in countries all around the world they're very practical they're often very cost effective so it's a very convincing argument and the benefits are all the benefits we've talked about the benefits of cleaning they're called short-lived climate pollutants the benefits are linked to climate they're linked to human health they're linked to crop production so it's a very strong message to people in developing countries that they feel the benefits early on so if they make some of these interventions which is one of the 16 measures they get the benefits for their population straight away so it's a very exciting time and what we really SAI is helping to to achieve is the scaling up of this initiative so that we can we can try and help solve this cook stove problem once and for all and the other thing that's really important are 16 measures and they're all interlinked and we're still at the stage where we need to explore those interlinkages and I think that's something that SAI is very passionate about systems, theory, holistic thinking etc and the other thing that we're passionate about is trying to learn from our mistakes now I'll just end with a quote this quote sort of sums up what we need to do when we have action-oriented projects action-oriented projects but a microcosm of development philosophies so for projects to be successful on a relatively wide scale they must be compatible with existing socio-economic and political structures and the structures should be amenable to change planners who aim at changing structures like this must be ready to accept the level of risk and the frustration involved which we've heard about so when was this written? it was written by the Bayer Institute in 1984 so we've known this for 30 years so let's do it, it's the time to act thank you very much thank you very much Kevin, Caroline, Fiona and Orser I want to pick up actually on one of the things that you've mentioned one of the things that seems apparent Kevin in your story you've talked about the empowerment of the woman who runs that farm but in other stories we've very much seen how women have been had a level of responsibility but maybe you've not had the tools or the ability to actually make the sort of change that you're talking about and I think that Caroline you've experienced a way in which gender is trying to be addressed in some of the new ways of thinking about cookstuff could you tell us a little bit about that yes, I mean like in the Kenya context and if I give with the example of this they did a lot to try and involve women because they are the ones who cook and so they were involved in the some of the design phases of the programs but then with time they realized that okay the women experienced the problem of cooking smoke they are keen to change but in the end one needs to invest to buy a new stove and the women in most cases are not the ones who control the men, it's the men so the men have so on this aspect then there was a realization that actually we needed to work with men as well in order to be able to succeed I think that's an interesting and perhaps a surprising conclusion about how to address gender issues we're very very lucky today to have in the audience a special guest a member of our Science Advisory Council Mark Pelling, Professor at Kings College London Mark has very kindly agreed to just have a comment and a reflection on some of the issues that you've raised during your story so Mark if I can ask you to come forward, I think you've got a mic there Luckily I have an expert in the mic It's on, it's on your lap Hello, yeah, thank you, thanks very much and well I mean it's a pleasure first of all to be here and to have heard and enjoyed the presentations of some of the staff I mean truly inspiring work all dealing with very complex issues but presented in such a simple way as well I think that's affecting and reflecting on some of the conversations I've had with policy makers and academics over the last months to do with the sustainable development goal process I thought I might say something on that and that's framed I suppose by a reflection as well on what I take to be one of the central missions of the SEI which is still very current and that is that we understand environmental challenges through development so it's through choices around behaviour it's through inequality it's through inequity, injustice over consumption that we understand the environment who controls it, how it's shaped and how we live with the environment which is the challenge now how do we indeed understand development in that lens and we have an opportunity perhaps a grand opportunity in the next year or so with the emergence of the new sustainable development goals to lead on from the millennium development goals goals that now will be global focus and we have an opportunity with the Paris climate change COP and the possibility of a new global climate change and in my small world of disaster risk reduction we also have a new international framework that will be signed next year building on the existing international framework so there's a real momentum and opportunity to embed development in our way of working with us towards a sustainable environment but there are several risks in there as well and one of them is the climate change and the word was mentioned but thankfully only once and that's the word resilience which crops up in many fields and opens warning lights for me it's certainly very dominant in the climate change adaptation field where I also work and resilience brings with it a sort of subtext around stability to enable economic growth to enable social progress but do we want stability in a system of life or systems of life that are manifestly unsustainable perhaps not the sustainable development goals the draft text is there now there are 17 of them perhaps 10 or 12 will survive the political rounds this spring and summer next spring and summer but resilience is there is the term of choice that captures a lot of these debates and now there's a system of indicators that will fall out of that so I think the moment is very ripe in SEI I hope we'll take this challenge to really unpack what resilience is and unpack the detail of the sustainable development goals to focus not on stability but to focus on change through these leverage points that we have and the opportunity that we have in the next year so just want to leave that point with you that the lens of SEI of bringing development and environment together is as critical as ever and now we have an opportunity in the next 6, 12 months of really leveraging that and SEI through its expertise but also through the political friends that it enjoys that opportunity and dare I say responsibility as well so thank you very much for this 5 minutes and I'll leave you there Thank you very much Mark it's amazing actually that you've brought up this point about dynamism as opposed to and change as opposed to resilience and we were talking about that actually earlier on and thinking a little bit about these are fascinating interventions and learning from the real experts and giving them and empowering them giving them the tools giving them a voice but I wanted to challenge you a little bit I mean what about the bigger development trends they say they want a cook stove that produces less smoke but what about bigger development trends to do with electrification I mean are we not just providing a short stop gap a very small incremental change rather than the sort of transformational processes that Mark is talking about Fiona I think it's really important to see it in terms of a longer term trajectory a development pathway actually and a stepwise approach to providing access to cleaner and safer ways of using energy for households so we wouldn't argue at all people should stop at an improved biomass cook stove like definitely not like the opposite and if you ask any household in India and many in Africa too the benchmark for a clean cook stove is not an improved biomass cook stove the benchmark is often an LP gas stove or an electric cooker Kevin there's an experience from China where there was biogas project and they went back five years later to see how it was going because it was successful when it started this biogas project and when they went back the women were using LPG from bottles so they sort of gone up this energy ladder they were sort of moving forwards so it's definitely a notion of this energy ladder that you need to move up so we're not saying everyone should use a cook stove all the time great okay thank you very much for your contribution today and your stories a round of applause to Kevin Caroline, Fiona and also now we're very honoured today not only to have His Majesty and her Royal Highness here with us today but also the new Minister for the Environment and also Romsson and I'd like to invite also to come up and give a short speech so welcome, thank you very much Minister for coming in today thank you very much and thank you for this day which I already learnt been very inspiring and for many I should start of course your Royal Highnesses Majesty Ladies and gentlemen I think it was a very wise decision made 25 years ago to start the Stockholm Environment Institute and I think we today can just see how it's grown into being a very important international player in the field of science based policy work offering its help to governments, to many others important stakeholders around the world and for me it makes also be even more pride to be part of the Swedish society that actually started all this knowing that the challenges that we have on earth today is really something we need to go to hand together in a global way in cooperation and with insight about our differences but also our common goals this is inspiring every time I learn about SAI work that you truly dig into this complex material of science and knowledge and cultures and of course it has been a pleasure during the years to follow some of the work from this Swedish perspective and I will be very happy in my capacity as a new climate environment minister for Sweden also to being even more educated with international partners that I think that the actors of SAI actually do a very important work and being open to see if there would be any other contributions as well to see if we could bring that work even further. I know that you have all the good contacts that you sometimes need and I know that there is an open door to listen and to get advice also from the Swedish government and I think during the years also the Swedish government been very helped by the work that we have been doing. The new Swedish government which have only been in the office a few weeks will present its first budget in just a few days I can say we truly want to work in the spirit of the Stockholm Environment Institute in the way of taking the global issue of climate environment issues at the core of our international policies but also our national policies and today I'm maybe most happy to see that we have reached out to the news that we next month will be able to do a great pledge at the pledging meeting for the UN FCC green fund with a four billion pledge for the coming four years I think that's something, a contribution that could grow new spirit which is really needed in the international climate negotiations but also writing the direction towards developing countries that this is an issue we need to work on together and I truly think that we will work also together with the institutes like the SCIs and your partner organizations as well in this work. So very happy birthday and happy anniversary and very pleased to be here and have a nice continuing day of enlightenment in this effort of global challenges are big but they are also part of a challenge that could prosper our generation and our future generation if we go together in this work. I think it was a good quote just a few minutes ago here that it's a lot work to do let's go to action and I like that spirit. Thank you very much. Thank you very much minister I know you've got a very busy schedule at the moment having really just taken office and there are many many challenges on your agenda not least as you say climate change and in the EU context where there are hot negotiations taking place. With the minister's speech we're now rounding off the pre-lunch session and I've got a few housekeeping tasks for you. Lunch now takes place upstairs so that is where you will be served your lunch and it is extremely important that you are back in this room at 5 minutes to 2 1355 as it shows here on the screen. To entice you to come back we'll be showing you a short film which describes some of the work of the climate and clean air commission that you've heard so much about in their work to scale up action on the ground in developed and developing countries to address not only issues around people's health but also climate change. So do come back and take a look at Soot which has a nice exclamation mark at the end which will start playing at around about quarter to two 1345 and make sure you're back in your seats at 1355. With that I'd like to ask you all to rise to allow the royal party to leave the room first. Once they have left the room you'll be very free to leave and you might even hear a little bit of music shortly. Thank you very much. Once upon a time the human enterprise kick started when we discovered how to make fire. We released the energy encapsulated in wood to make cozy fires for cooking and warming our houses. We released the energy in ancient sunlight stored underground by burning oil, coal and natural gas. We used that energy for moving ourselves around in cars, trucks and aeroplanes for generating electricity. Humans are real pyromaniacs. The image of how to use fire is vast. It has been vital in helping us to prosper. But this burning releases soot. The soot is everywhere around us. Scientists have shown that it contributes to warming up the globe. Back in the early days we were a few people living on a big planet. Emissions from our harnessing of fire were not a problem. Today we are seven billion people on such smaller planet. Every year huge quantities of particles including soot and pollutant gases enter the atmosphere as a result of incomplete burning of wood and fossil fuels. So what is soot? Scientists use the term black carbon to describe those particles that come from incomplete combustion that are mostly made up of carbon. Carbon dioxide mostly sticks around in the atmosphere for a hundred years or more. But black carbon only lasts a few days. So reducing soot has an immediate effect. It's called black of course because these particles are black and they absorb sunlight the way a black t-shirt does in the summer. When black carbon falls on polar ice caps and mounting glaciers it makes them darker. So they reflect less of the sun's energy back out to space and they absorb more heat and the ice melts faster. Oh my gosh, look at this stuff. I had no idea it was so thick in here. It's amazing. Production of goods and transportation that produces fine particulate air pollution including black carbon affects the health of people often than the poorer parts of the world and the health of the planet as a whole. What is emitted in one part of the world will have effects in another part. Black carbon emissions from sources including deforestation and burning of biomass in one area can alter rainfall patterns over a much wider region as well as having domino effects by affecting downwind and regionally connected weather systems. Fortunately, the worst sources of black carbon are well known. First cooking stoves using firewood and kerosene lamps to light up the evenings. Second, farming, burning open fields, grasses and woodlands and burning of agricultural and forestry waste. Third, diesel vehicles without modern pollution controls and cargo ships burning bunker fuel. Finally, industries like traditional brick kilns and coke ovens that use enormous amounts of firewood, coal and such or flaring from oil and natural gas production. Second, is what can we do about it? We can install particle filters on all diesel engines. More efficient industries like kiln designs that use less energy producing less pollution. It may sound like a mammoth task, but it can be done because we have the technology. The trick is how to achieve the implementation. For example, owners need supportive loan structures to help fund upfront investments. Close to three billion people worldwide cook their food on open fires and leaky stoves using biomass such as wood, animal dung and crop waste or coal. So a big step is to work together in making a switch to simple low-cost modern stoves that use clean fuels and are already designed and could be widely distributed. In some villages in Maja Pradesh, cattle manure is already being used to produce relatively clean biogas for burning and this releases a lot less soot than directly burning the manure. Among children under the age of five, pneumonia is the most common cause of death worldwide of which half is caused by toxic indoor smoke. We did realize that the health effects of black carbon on the health of especially women and children about three million women die from a related risk and respiratory problems. Uganda was one of the first countries to join America and Sweden to establish the CAC and the benefits of trying to halt the emission of black carbon is tremendous and also we look at deforestation you know, we'll be able to have you know, a better sustainable management of the forest. Deforestation The change of land used from forest to agriculture clearing the land off the logging and the basic practice of slash and burn agriculture creates a lot of soot and other particles and polluting gases with important trans-boundary effects on climate and health. Burning of residues is the cheapest way for the farmer to prepare land after harvest. A solution to the burning of fields is to plow in the residues to use as livestock feed or for biogas. There are nine specific solutions that scientists have evaluated. If we could drastically reduce black carbon emissions together with other short-lived climate pollutants we could potentially prevent more than two and a half million deaths per year from outdoor air pollution alone. Another major benefit would be to reduce the rate of global warming and significantly increase our chances to stay within the two-degree target. We would also avoid disrupted rainfall patterns that put agriculture and ecosystems in jeopardy. The only obstacle that you want to highlight is the political well and political commitment, you know, to implement the national plan at the national level. But when we get everybody, you know, political leaders, civil societies and youths on board, then I think we'll be able to cross the barrier and make gains. And in addition, you spend less money on health because people will be healthy. So that is why I believe that public education should be strong and then also bring on board our political leaders to understand the economic gain in trying to reduce carbon emissions. What we need to accomplish can only be done together. This must be a joint effort. We need to be wise. These are impacts that we can deal with now. Time for a global chimney sweep. We all need to be involved. Ladies and gentlemen, can I ask you to begin to take your seats, please? Can you take your seats, please? Please take your seats, everybody. Thank you very much. Good afternoon, everybody. Once again, a great thanks to the eclectic Sparks. Introduce you to them this time because they're a bit special. They're sort of like our house band at SEI because we've got Dr. Heaven Hicks on. Yay, he kicks. And he's Dr. Heaven Hicks and he plays lead guitar. And he's based actually at our York Center. We have Sophie Gilligan playing violin. Richard Clay, who is also based at our SEI York Center. And he's responsible for producing all of our wonderful publications that you can find just outside the room. And he's on mandolin. And then Patrick Gilligan is on bass guitar. So again, I think, and a round of applause to thank them for. Don't mean a thing. I hope you enjoyed your lunch. Thank you all for our next set of presentations including a keynote. And we're going to move a little bit away from talking about what the challenges are and what the potential solutions might be for sustainable development. We're going to look at a little bit more about who it is, who has the ability to take action and how they actually might make a change and how SEI could support them in that process. I'm going to start off with just a quick map this time. You'll be familiar with this. This is the London Underground map. And it was created, not quite in this format, but it was created in 1931 by this chap, Harry Beck, who is a designer. And it essentially hasn't changed a lot. Obviously the lines have got longer as things have been developed. But the interesting thing and the reason why I want to share this map with you is that it's not particularly accurate, but it's very usable. And over time people have tried to improve it and make it more real. But actually probably through force of habit, but also because it's very usable it stood the test of time and it's the one that we all use and are familiar with. And this fact about the usability of information that information helps us navigate reality. But that information needs to be packaged and presented in a way that's usable and appropriate for policymakers or your London Underground commuter is absolutely crucial. And it's one that I think we're going to explore this afternoon with a range of speakers. And to help me do that I'm going to invite on to the stage also special. And to do that I'm going to ask you to come up also. Come on up, come on up please. And also it's a fantastic researcher. And when I joined SCI one of the things that I was involved with was the planetary boundaries research. Now last Thursday there was a big meeting in Berlin I think it was to look at the concept of the Anthropocene a new geological age in which man is the great driver of change. Now that's produced lots of column inches including this article from the New York Times. And this article actually mentions Dr. Orser Peershon as being one of the experts in planetary boundaries governance. So we're in the area of decision making around those great challenges that we identified and began to explore way back about six years ago in 2008. So Orser is well qualified to guide you and our speakers through discussions around applying insights. So welcome to Orser. Thank you so much for that introduction Rob. Planetary boundaries a very interesting story in its own right had a big impact also raised some critical debates but we're going to save that story for another anniversary. So as Rob said we heard this morning about some problems we heard about some solutions and now we'll focus on how we deliver solutions to problems or is it vice versa sometimes. So really we will be addressing the core mission of SEI how do we most effectively bridge science and policy to bring about sustainable development. And also in doing that how do we balance as researchers and as an institute that fine line between providing knowledge and advocating for certain policy option. This is a constant debate we have internally. But to start off this conversation we thought it would be nice to have some external perspectives on SEI and we're very happy to have two members of our Science Advisory Council with us today both with long experience Professor Susan Owens and Professor Virapatran Ramanasan and we'll start off with inviting Susan Owens she will deliver a keynote to us and Professor Susan Owens is by now a familiar face in Stockholm at Sweden she is based at Cambridge University she is a Professor of Environment in the Department of Geography but a few years ago she was the king called 16th Gustav Professor of Environmental Science at the Stockholm Resilience Center and the Royal Institute of Technology has numerous academic awards too many to mention here but she is particularly well placed to address this question given that her expertise is exactly on this interface between science and politics which she also has personal experience from through your membership in the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution which advised the UK government for quite some years so her topic of today is Science, Policy and Practice Thank you very much Rosa for that introduction Your Majesty Your Royal Highness Excellencies Colleagues and Friends It's a real privilege for me I've had some connection with SEI for a very long time but it's a huge privilege to be here to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the organisation and as always it's wonderful to be back in Stockholm I come at any excuse and this is a very very good one This morning we've heard some very inspiring examples of the work of SEI and we have some more to come later on this afternoon and I think everyone here will agree that SEI is a very special kind of institution and in its own words it supports decision making for sustainable development by providing integrative knowledge that bridges science and policy SEI's territory therefore its habitat if you like is that of the bridge sometimes called the boundary and sometimes the interface connecting science and policy The metaphors that we use to describe this very interesting territory are never quite adequate because they always imply that science is here on one side and policy is here on the other and that they're separate spheres and none of the metaphors bridge, boundary, interface fully captures the complexities of the operating environment for an organisation like SEI This is an environment in which science and indeed many different kinds of knowledge and expertise as we've heard this morning politics, policy making and practice very important not to forget practice are in a kind of constant, very fluid and dynamic interaction with one another I'm going to use the term science and policy in what I say but I'm not forgetting that it's even more complicated than that because it includes a lot of knowledge as well as different kinds of policy making and practice but let me just say two things about this territory One is that its very complexity means that outcomes are incredibly difficult to determine and we all know that we can't say that because a particular piece of knowledge becomes available policy will change accordingly I'll come back to that point later which is increasingly one of controversy and therefore it's always in public and political it always comes to public and political attention very interestingly as well the relationship between science and policy is increasingly an area in which all of us whether we work in research or in the policy side feel more and more accountable so those of us in UK universities are currently waiting rather anxiously for the outcome of our most recent research assessment exercise and this time it was different because this time as well as reporting our academic achievements we had to report on the impact that our academic research has had in a formal way in the research assessment exercise and it was new and it was very challenging and very difficult for all of us to find ways of doing that and SEI also is very conscious of the need to make a difference through its work and it's actually very good at doing that as we've been hearing this morning but it's also very conscious and I know this as a member of the Science Advisory Council it's conscious of the need to get a better understanding of the way in which policy processes actually work and the complex contexts in which policies in the real world get made and I notice just as an aside here that this is one area in which the interdisciplinary nature of SEI the fact that it brings together people from widely different disciplines people from the natural sciences as well as people from the social sciences it's very very helpful to have that mix in understanding the policy and political environments in which SEI's work comes to have effect so what do we understand after a lot of research over several decades about this interface between science and policy about the bridge how, for example, do we explain the paradox that I think all of us have observed sometimes we have abundant knowledge but very little action and sometimes we have plenty of action rather sadly based on very little knowledge and how is it that these different relations coexist with one another and this is my area of work so I could talk forever but I'm just going to pull out three lessons that have probably been learned over the last few decades about the nature of these interactions first science very rarely informs policy in a simple and straightforward manner and of course you're thinking no we know science doesn't inform policy in a linear manner everyone here knows that perhaps the most interesting thing is that the myth of a linear relationship, a technical linear relationship in which science feeds into policy is one of the most tenacious myths about this particular interface and however hard you try it keeps coming back in my own work I was as also mentioned a member of the UK Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution established in 1970 I wasn't a member then I hasten to add but that was a body that came in at the beginning of the environmental revolution but as well as being a member I've also studied its impacts I've studied its effects and one of the things I've learned from that work is that the impacts of the knowledge and advice and expertise of a body such as that advisory body are sometimes very immediate, direct the quickest ever acceptance of a policy was 35 minutes that was a record sometimes they take much longer over periods of years even decades sometimes they're diffuse sometimes invisible effects and sometimes sadly no effect at all so what is interesting here is not just the question how does science influence policy but under what circumstances is the influence rapid, slow or non-existent and I could talk about that for a long time and it's all very fascinating but I'll come to my second point if things don't seem to be changing fast enough it's not enough to shout louder it's not enough for scientists who feel frustrated that policy makers aren't taking account of the knowledge that they've generated to say hey you know we'll say it again we'll say it more loudly that's not to suggest of course that communication is unimportant it's always better to be communicative than not to be communicative the point is that communication is one factor amongst many at the interface between science and policy two things stand out and have been emphasised by this morning's presentations one is that we need a rich concept of communication this isn't one way scientists speaking truth to power communication must be multi-directional we must hear from all sides in these discussions and secondly and this relates very much to the subject of today's discussions communication no let me say that in a different way facts are not enough facts may sometimes even be irrelevant what happens what matters most is that people tell good stories that they have convincing narratives in other words communication has vital discursive dimensions that go alongside the facts and I think you'll agree from what we've already heard today that SCI has been rather brilliant at creating stories and storylines in order to communicate on the bridge as effective as possible the third point in the long view over a long period if we look back say to 1989 when SCI was founded or if we go back to 1970 when lots of environmental institutions were founded we see that knowledge does matter it does make a difference it's impossible to account for all the developments in environmental politics and policymaking over the last half century if we try to say knowledge doesn't matter of course it matters however it matters alongside and always in combination with political priorities economic imperatives social norms and sometimes worse it's always mixed up with all of these other factors and that means that the effects of science and other forms of knowledge are not always rapid they're sometimes very gradual very diffuse and they take place through vital social processes such as policy learning which is slow Carol Weiss the American political scientist has called enlightenment and I think again you'll agree that SCI in its 25 years of existence has had an amazing role in the process of enlightenment at this interface between science and policy for my last few moments let me come back to the boundary and observe I said a few moments ago that possibly it was problematic to think of science and policy as being two completely separate social worlds and I think if we think of any of the major issues of the kind that a body like SCI deals with grapples with all the time climate change, food security loss of biodiversity and so on and so on we can see that those are typically areas in which the science and the politics are very difficult to disentangle completely so we don't always we can't easily see where the science ends and the politics begins or whether politics ends and the science begins in another metaphor the science and the policy politics mingle on the bridge and they may not always know which end they've got to go back to when they've finished their mingling and this has two very important effects and they both summed up by the concept that's been developed by a lot of scholars in science and technology studies over the last couple of decades the concept of boundary work and boundary work sometimes a bit defensive because if there's no clear defining line between science and policy and if we don't want science and politics just to collapse into one another if we want them to remain in some ways distinctive then boundaries have to be constructed all the time and they have to be defended and we see this process going on just observe what happens in climate change negotiations it's very visible to see and that's what Thomas Gehrin recognised as boundary work in the first instance but there's another form of boundary work in which organisations and individuals coordinate across boundaries they bridge between science and politics and that's a very critical role of what some social scientists would refer to as boundary organisations with this very vital role in the middle of the bridge if you like the metaphor boundary organisations have three particular characteristics they exist at the frontier of science and politics they involve actors from both sides from both social worlds and they also very interestingly create what have been called boundary objects which mean something to people on both sides they mean something in the scientific world they mean something in the world of policy and boundary objects may be particular reports particular models particular ways of doing things or even ideas and so perhaps the last thought I'd like to to leave you with is that SEI was a boundary organisation probably before we even started to use the term and it's been an extremely effective operator in that area of the boundary between science and politics and perhaps the great challenge now and I know we'll hear more from us about this later this afternoon is how it should continue this very vital boundary work in such a rapidly changing global environment thank you very much thank you so much Susan for your excellent observations which do resonate I think very well with also how research staff perceive SEI just one quick question before we invite up our next speaker you talked about the speed of change the speed of influence from science to policy given that we so often hear about how urgent global environmental change threats are today and we're heading for a four degree world etc. are there any silver bullets on how to speed up change or would this do we simply need to become much more patient researchers yes I don't think there are any silver bullets though one thing that in my view would help a great deal is if both let's simplify this isn't just science and politics but let's just simplify for a moment scientists have become much better at talking about uncertainties and in certitude of various kinds and better at acknowledging and representing those uncertainties so that has helped I would sometimes also like to see political actors acknowledging their constraints and degrees of freedom and it wouldn't be a silver bullet but to have a better we often hear about you know the understanding of science public and political understanding of science but I think we might also talk about scientists understanding of politics just as much and if there was that great and mutual understanding on both sides it would be better it might sometimes be refreshing though possibly politically a little risky if politicians said to scientists tell me what you know what to do here and then said but by the way whatever you tell me to do I'm going to do this because sometimes the political degrees of freedom are so constrained that there isn't a lot of choice and I think understanding those constraints would be a step forward thank you so much so with that I'd like to invite our next speaker Professor Ramanathan to join us he is distinguished professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California in San Diego and also UNESCO Professor of Climate and Policy at Terry University in New Delhi he's made many contributions to atmospheric sciences including atmospheric aerosol research which I believe we will hear more about and in Sweden we perhaps know him best as a member of the Royal Academy of Science since 2008 and a laureate of the Volvo Environment Prize thank you very much this is a great privilege and honor for me just looking at the title it's rather unusual for a physical scientist like me to talk about pursuit of the common good so this journey for me began about 40 years ago but a singular event last year brought it to the foreground that singular event early in 2013 my wife and I spent 10 weeks living in villages in India but every 5-6 days the living condition was so harsh we would escape to the nearest city just for a shower and a cold glass of beer so this going back and forth between the villages and the city made me discover there is indeed there are 2 worlds in this planet living side by side so let me introduce to my 2 worlds the first world is where a billion of us live maybe close to 1.2 billion we behave as if there is unlimited supply of fossil fuels this a billion consume about 50% of the total energy emit about 50-60% of the total greenhouse gases more importantly if you look at the future growth 2-3rds of the growth is not coming from population increase it's coming from this group so with that let's take remember for a deliberate reason I have not put any human face to this world then let me take you to the other world and it's been extensively talked about this morning 3 billion have no access to fossil fuel or they cannot afford it so we learned for basic needs like cooking they still rely on biomass fuels they the response for less than 5% of the total energy consumption and less than 8% of greenhouse gas emissions unfortunately it's this group who would suffer the worst consequences of climate change both now and in the future so we a Cambridge economist part of the Sculptor and I wrote a paper recently in which we concluded it's the pursuit of the common good which offers the solution to disrupt this explosive feedback between unsustainable consumption by a few poverty environment and population but I want to take this further and propose a specific idea to break this disruptive loop in so doing I am following a formula which has worked very well for me in the past before I get into that let me give you some background it was about 1896 the famous Swedish scientist Vontarenius did the most decisive calculation on the greenhouse effect of CO2 for nearly 80 years scientists believed carbon dioxide is the only greenhouse gas we have to worry that all changed in 1975 when I discovered the greenhouse effect of hello carbons which were used as refrigerants and propellants the particular hello carbon I was working on CFCs, chlorofluorocarbons and my work showed adding one molecule of this CFCs releasing from can like this as the same warming effect as adding 10,000 molecules of CO2 this discovery came about a year after the publication of the famous paper by Molina and Roland showing that the same CFCs were also destroying the ozone layer the Montreal Protocol was the result of that but recently as was declared by Economist magazine the Montreal Protocol had a huge co-benefit it mitigated so much of climate change from these CFCs so since that 1975 paper more pollutants global warming pollutants were added so much so that now 50% of the heat added to the planet is coming from these other gases and the other 50% is CO2 out of this 50% from the non-CO2 there are four pollutants whose lifetime is short black carbon same as soot methane hello carbons, HFCs and ozone in the lower atmosphere so they add about a third of the heating so in a meeting organized similar to this by the Stockholm Environment Institute 2008 I proposed this how mitigating emissions of the short-lived climate pollutants would slow down climate change by nearly 50% and remarkably in a period of four years this idea was accepted by the science and policy community which led to the formation of the Climate and Clean Air Coalition which is 40 countries the Stockholm Environment Institute played a major role in making this happen in taking that knowledge and converting action field which played equally important role but the SCI had a big role but who are the primary movers and shakers behind this there were three former minister Lena Eck who really carried the torch and then joined by Secretary of Security Clinton and the head of UNEP, Akim Steiner and again now in this climate and clean air coalition the Stockholm Environment Institute played a major role in implementing these actions in the field so what is my formula when I have an idea for climate mitigation I wait for an invitation from the Stockholm Environment Institute and that is the reason I am here so let me propose my idea for breaking this what I call a conflict between unsustainable consumption poverty pollution and environment so I call it the two world approach we hear so much about decarbonizing the economy avoiding waste that all applies to the top 1 billion, the world they live in they must reduce their CO2 emissions by switching to renewables by avoiding waste just to give you an example of the waste all the food produced is wasted if you look at the CO2 emissions from this wasted food that is just next to the total emissions by US and China it is huge and it is something unnecessary same thing with the efficiency etc so what is the bottom 3 billion deal they on the other hand need energy access we learned about this this morning session and so in a project we started 6 years ago we cook stoves like this still using solid biomass improved stoves reduce CO2 consumption by 50% cuts down soot emissions by 100% and black carbon as we heard is the dark matter which comes in smoke and it is the second largest contributor to global warming so what is the cost involved decarbonizing the economy of the 1.2 billion is roughly about 1000 dollars a person per capita so it is a 1000 dollar problem in terms of providing energy access to the bottom 3 billion again argue that should be paid by the top 1 billion for 3 reasons one we share common interest with others in the planet the second purely for selfish reasons if we if we don't do that the bottom 3 billion get on to the fossil fuel ladder their fossil fuel emission alone would go to 15 billion tons a year you know the 25 years the third issue is of course equity and morality so clearly we have come to a crossroads we need came changing approaches to changes people's behavior to nature and people's behavior to each other clearly these are issues beyond the role of science and policy we need moral leaders to engage us towards this approach it's because of this again the Cambridge Economist part of the the Archbishop Minner of the France and myself we organized a meeting at the Vatican under Pope Francis invitation in this meeting which happened in May of this year we gathered a group of philosophers theologians and world-renowned scientists including several Nobel laureates this group basically acknowledged all the things we have heard this morning and they promote adopting adopting these measures we briefed the Pope after the meeting the basic agreement by this group is that we need a transformational step how do we get there basically the world's religious leaders to mobilize public opinion towards collective action in pursuit of the common good thank you thank you so much Romanathan and I think going back to the question and the mission of SCI I think this perhaps suggests a little bit expanding that we need to think about ways to bridge science to society including religious leaders I would like to unfortunately we don't have too much time to pick up so many interesting aspects that you have raised but the sustainable development goals were raised before lunch so I was wondering if you have been involved particularly in that process and also Susan what do you think about goals as a sort of policy tool in general do they have a visionary function or could they have some instrumental effects but let's start with you Romanathan I was generously going to let Susan answer it but I will start honestly when you look at the way there's two worlds approach about how there is one group and there's a bottom three billion these are all fundamental issues in sustainability right why are they poor the multiple reasons but one reason is energy access and the energy access argument I'm giving is really to mitigate climate change so I think what I'm personally finding and we found in this meeting that climate change air pollution poverty environment they're all linked in a nexus so the sustainable development goals I've seen them they are going to be announced September of next year I think they include all of this so I think it is phenomenal to have those aspirational goals but what we have learned from the climate and clean air coalition is you need to take those goals and implement it in the field and the SDGs are so big I would think we need at least 100 SEIs to do that yes I think having visionary goals is hugely important it's important as a political symbol and it's important as something to work towards and in a funny way goals are stories as well because they spell out what needs to be done I think there are some risks and some dangers in a goal-driven approach or a target-led approach sometimes what's critical is to maintain the big picture and for the exercise not to slip into being a kind of tick box exercise which can be counterproductive so I think these goals are a bit double-edged both very important and have to be managed with caution as well thank you so a last question to you both picking up on the theme for today in this anniversary namely packaging our knowledge information into stories Susan, you mentioned this in your speech as well, the need for storylines to create meaning but also to be a bit self-critical which we should be as a research institute are there any risks if we become too dependent on sort of presenting our knowledge in stories where there are real people where there may be emotional appeal to leave the traditional way of presenting scientific results aside I think there are risks every story is a simplification and sometimes something very important is lost in that simplification I mean the story, the example that comes to my mind is the storyline of ecosystem services which has been immensely powerful in generating action and interest in the world but at the same time it seems to me that as a humanity has been on the planet for about two minutes and then it sees the rest of non-human nature as a set of services that's something a little bit risky as well and it has some downsides just one other quick point the stories become frames that people adhere to in political conflicts they're not always consciously adopted they might be there in different people's perspectives on how to proceed on certain issues and then they're very powerful agents of policy change I just want to address one quick point which has not come up so far in terms of taking knowledge to actions in the field what I personally found was there are so many workable ideas I think what we really need desperately is how do you scale them up we are talking about billions of people the projects done are covering few hundred thousand to a million so that's I think where tremendous work needs to be done we don't have time the planet is heating up so the scaling up I hope there will be some effort initiated in research groups like this so going back to your question on the story I'm going to tell you a story to answer that story question yes last evening I just learned about my talk here two three days ago so I sent my slides to Rob around six o'clock and he and his enormously good deputy I get my colleagues back at midnight I was horrified all my graphs my equations were gone and you saw what was here but I learned this is a powerful way to tell your science so thank you Rob I've learned something so unfortunately we need to conclude this part of the session I'd like to thank you both again and ask you to return to your seats and being aware of the risks also involved in storytelling perhaps benefits far outweigh them who knows we're going to continue with our storytelling mode and I'd like to invite the four next storytellers to the stage so we're going to we thought rather than have some sort of introspective soul searching discussion on how to bridge science and policy we best demonstrate how we work through these stories with real examples but just to give you some introduction to these four quite separate quite disparate stories I did a sort of being a researcher I did a mini survey in the office asking people how what characterizes SEI and two points came up and I was really it was interesting also that they came up this morning in the earlier talks so to understand how SEI operates there's a feeling that SEI research typically departs from this messy place we call reality this sounds a bit pretentious sort of self-evident but it's quite different from other models where you have a control setting such as a lab or a very abstract computer model but this also makes it hard from the outside to identify trademark SEI solutions models concepts a few one-size-fits-all approaches in our organization and as someone said this morning our role is really to show the world how it is not how it should be and this has two implications first that we work very closely with stakeholders from an early stage in the research process and also that we tend to use integrated approaches combining disciplines natural and social science the other point that came out from this little survey was that our role is also not just to describe environmental problems but also again which this morning testified to show dilemmas between environmental constraints and human development aspirations and not just to pay lip service to those aspirations but to really genuinely understand them engage with them aspirations that we all share quality of life stable income decent health education sanitation etc so I just wanted to leave those two sort of observations of what characterizes SEI with you and we'll see how they might be reflected in the stories we will hear and we will start with a story which I think will actually connect to the sustainable development goals and also what Ramanathan said about how to translate these global goals into real action on the ground and here to tell his story is Kim Andersson research fellow in Stockholm Kim is a water and sanitation expert with a focus on the reuse of water I spent a lot of time in Colombia working on this and using his background as an environmental engineer he's come across these very human aspects of the sanitation problem Thanks Åsson I will take the advice of Mark Pelling what he said before that we have to look at the opportunity in this process of shifting from the millennium development goals to the sustainable development goals but I would do it looking at sanitation development and what are the opportunities and challenges that we have for sanitation development so actually the MDG the Millennium Development Goals they were the first major efforts actually to address the immense sanitation challenge that we have in the world and the target was set to half the population without access to basic sanitation between the year 2000 and 2015 but if we compare the baseline data that we use from 1990 and where we are today we can actually see that a quarter billion or a quarter of the world population has gained access to sanitation but still we are far from the target about 1 billion people still practicing open defecation and many sanitation programs have had a very strong focus on just this eliminating open defecation and providing toilets but without really paying attention to the need to assure long term use and function of the systems so if we count today in the world about 4 billion people who doesn't have a functional sanitation system so this image that I took in Bihar, India kind of reflects this this is a family that got a toilet from a government program and as you can see it's being used for drying cow dung probably for the cooking cook stoves so the people in this family they still have to go to the field to defecate and with the risk that implies for women, children etc and still do we count this as a toilet that the family has access to toilet one can question that so the sustainable development goals at least the proposal as it stands today it sets a base for a more holistic approach so the proposed targets when it comes to sanitation they talk about equitable access to equitable sanitation and they also talk about hygiene for all so a more stronger social dimension at the same time they have targets talking about reuse of waste and also treatment so I think we can take important steps towards more sustainable development but there will be plenty of social and technological challenges to get there if we see some of the problems in the world it's a very diverse context with a lot of different biophysical conditions we have different environmental issues in different regions of the world and not least the people that we want to impact different cultures, different habits so when we formulate new policies new programs or even the monitoring of the quite ambitious sanitation targets we have to take all this into consideration that it's a very complex situation we think that one way to go about this is to really demonstrate the positive benefits that integrated solution can have so I will give an example this is from Laos where we've been working with a productive model so actually it's inspired by municipalities in Sweden and today this city most of the waste ends up in the urban channels the city has an urban network of natural channels but they are today really conveyor of waste water of solid waste etc so if we take a resource an integrated resource approach on this and actually see what can we do of the waste streams then one can actually harvest the organic sludge material from the sanitation system we can start to collect the kitchen waste we can harvest the plants from the the canals and actually this can all be input in biogas production so actually we can support the energy system of the city at the same time that what comes out of the biogas digester the biosolid further treatment together with separated urine we can get these waste streams to the to the field and produce food so by getting cleaner channels we also get benefits of producing food and energy for the city but of course these kind of systems trying to close these loops of resources will have challenges as well and some questions that might come up is how do we really build systems toilets that attracts the users how can we involve business ensuring that someone actually going to take care of this material and but then we also have to to get the agricultural side, the farmers and also the consumers can they accept this the use of waste in the food production system and of course we need to have different sectors speaking to each other so in the cross sector dialogues are very important so just to conclude I think this immense challenge to shift from open defecation to the use of human excretas we heard about with the cook stove a big part of the success is actually to understand the needs of the people and the mechanism driving behaviour change I think I stopped there, thanks Thank you so much Kim for talking about sustainable sanitation which is also another one of these SCI initiatives we're hoping to start off it seems so is there now a paradigm shift from seeing sanitation as a technical issue of providing infrastructure to behavioural understanding behaviour I hope it's going to be stronger part of development in the future to really take in the behaviour side but I wouldn't say that it's a big shift at the same time today there is also programs trying just to get people out of open defecation so they kind of hardly any technical support so what I see is that it has to be much stronger integrated, you have to have both the social and the technological on board, you have to have the people kind of expressing their needs at the end we have to have something that inspire them to use the system to maintain the system at the same time we have to find the technologies that can provide this for the people and also to make these linkages to close the resource loops we will need some innovations on the technical side so an integrated social and technological development I hope in the future okay, thank you so much we're going to move on to our next story so speaking about understanding behavior change we were lucky to recruit Dr. Jenny Rowe about a year ago who is an expert on human behavior you have a degree in environmental psychology and you're now senior research leader in York at our York center and I think while you research very basic aspects of human behavior you know your look at stress levels for example which are probably people in the stone age also where stressed use very novel and high tech methods so please share your story with us. Thank you I'm going to start with some old English proverbs about human behavior you probably know them they translate just into about any language in the world let's take the bottom one of those you can't teach an old dog new tricks as a child it took me a while to realize that whilst directed at animals these statements were actually targeted at human beings and particularly our older people now with a psychologist hat on just excuse me while I put this on my head doesn't feel very secure with a psychologist hat on I'm beginning to challenge some of these beliefs about the human condition and generate what I like to call disruptive hypotheses so taking the bottom statement again you can't always teach an old dog new tricks but I believe that you can so going on to old age for a moment old age is the biggest growing demographic in the world 2050 one in five of us will be over the age of 60 in Japan already 30% of the population is over 60 that's big that is very big and as a society it's an economic challenge for us because very simply old age costs so we need some new tricks and I as an environment psychologist are looking at place based solutions how the environment can help promote healthier behaviors in our older people and also looking at emotion and how emotion intersects with the environment because emotion as we know is a key driver in human behavior so in a novel hypothesis I'm suggesting that mood is the key to creating better environments that can promote happier more meaningful and less stressful walking in older people this is the focus of a project called mood mobility in place it's a collaborative project with UK universities but you're probably wondering why I've got this hat on well this is a neural headset and what it does is it measures EEG that's electrical activity emanating from our cerebral cortex and for the first time we've got this kit mobile we've integrated it with a geographic positioning system and we can actually map how people feel as they are walking through the environment and here's one of our older participants in the study wearing the hat now I'd like to take you on a journey into the streets of urban psychology and specifically into Hackney Hackney is in the east end of London the yellow route here is the route that our older participants are following this is an urban gritty industrial location and it's very deprived and it's ripe for regeneration now I'm going to show you the output from the cap from one of our research participants at the bottom there you will see 14 lines of brain activity output which are linked to the 14 sensor pads on my head now some very clever neuroscientists at SEI are streamlining this data and converting it into emotional parameters of frustration, meditation stress and up here on the map is a map of excitement this is a heat map of one of our participants sorry excitement levels as they walk that yellow line and there are hotspots where you see the colour intensified these are hotspots of excitement so let's take a look at one of those hotspots and here it is and it's rather surprising because the older people in this study are engaged with the graffiti along this canal side path not what you might have thought this at its engaging and curiosity is really key to our well being and the person walking behind the older person with the headset on too is an architectural student who is using this information to generate designs for an age friendly Hackney and an age friendly London and this is just one of the images from the students of what that place might look like so I hear you're saying this is just one person's output from the cap obviously we need to scale this up we've talked a lot today about scaling up and we're doing precisely that with 120 participants mapping these hotspots the positive hotspots and the negative stress points and in 2017 at the end of our study we'll use these findings to lobby the UK Parliament to make changes to generate more health promoting cities so finally I want to leave you with a thought Mary Angelou said people will forget what you say people will forget what you do but people will never forget how you feel so as a positive psychologist the challenge I think for changing behaviour is leaving people with a good feeling, thank you Thanks Jenny that's really thought provoking and it makes me want to have one of those hats when communicating with family members and bosses and other people would make it much more efficient I think to see your work in context I think it nice compliments this other work in SEI that I'm familiar with those researchers looked at the environmental impact of the ageing society carbon emissions and the like but this is really focusing on how to create a better environment but my question to you given that you are an expert in behaviour and you talked about the powerful quote on emotions what would be most effective to tap into positive or negative emotions to stimulate change and related to that I'm also interested in how you see the potential for applying the methods that you work with on more let's say global problems and for example building scenarios of low carbon societies okay well I think talking about positive and negative emotion and drivers of behaviour very much depends upon context so for instance in West Africa right now there is a need to change behaviours in relation to health and the Ebola crisis and sadly there fear will be a driver but coming from positive psychology I'm trying to use more positive methods to promote change and looking at low carbon behaviours I think the key is to make low carbon behaviour kind of cool to make it a lifestyle sort of change and to really tap into people's needs and desires okay thanks and moving on to the next story we're going to make a radical shift I warn you not just in the geographical context but also in social and political realities so we're moving from Hackney the Middle East and a place of severe conflict typically we understand conflicts in this part of the world in terms of human behaviour and political behaviour more specifically but you will also tell us a bit about environmental drivers and the role of water in both the causes and solutions in this conflict Dr Annette Huber Lee is a senior scientist at our US Centre where she works on both international domestic water planning with experience from a diverse set of countries California, the Middle East and Southeast Asia and it also has a background in engineering but as her story will tell you're confronted with very human issues so please the floor is yours thank you my passion in life is to make a difference with human suffering I've been working 20 years in the Middle East at the national scale looking with Israel, Jordan and Palestine to try to promote more equitable water sharing may I just say to you it gets a bit discouraging sometimes but in 2011 I met Mohammed and Mohammed really re-inspired me to continue this work in the Middle East so this is a story about Mohammed SEI and the importance of trust this is one of Mohammed's pictures Mohammed loves to take pictures and make videos he learned to do this in the refugee camp in the West Bank in a youth centre that tries to teach nonviolent forms of communication as some of you might recognize this is the wall between Palestine and Israel this wall divides in so many ways as I work on both sides of the wall I can tell you that both sides face stress but the side that Mohammed's on faces profound uncertain stress every day wondering will the troops come in and arrest me my father will they terrorize the children my grandparents will there be a curfew today will the schools be open myself or my father get to work but amidst all of this the most frustrating thing to Mohammed and to so many people in Palestine and Jordan is not having reliable access to water so when I see that wall I see a wall that divides the people who have water 24-7 and the people who don't Palestinians are resourceful people like people all over the world they send their children out with small containers and try to find public taps where they can get water for the day if they're wealthy enough they will buy water from tanker trucks but it's very expensive when water does come it's frantic they don't know when it's coming they call each other on the phone the water is here everybody gets their little pumps going they pray that there's electricity so that they can pump the water I got ahead of myself up to these roof tanks and they have wrenches and they're moving these hoses around it's complete craziness and this is in a way how I met Mohammed he made a short documentary called Everyday Nakba Nakba in Arabic means catastrophe but for Palestinian refugees it has a double meaning it's the name of the day they commemorate being forced out of their homes in 1948 so Mohammed is putting on a par with that catastrophe the catastrophe they face every day in not knowing whether they have water I had the chance then to meet Mohammed after viewing his film and he invited me to the refugee camp and for those of you who know people in the Middle East it's very hospitable and you cannot say no so I went to the refugee camp and sat with the refugees and asked them about their stories while I was working on the national scale to try to bring more water the story that kept coming up was they were afraid of the water quality they were afraid they were being poisoned so I went back and involved some professors and graduate students from Tufts University and we started a water quality testing program we worked at this youth center focusing on women and youth and taught them how to do water quality testing so the good news is nobody was being poisoned unfortunately the bad news was there's a lot of bacteria throughout the camp and it was due to the fact that they're intermittent water supplies so we shifted gears and started an education program working with the youth center and the school system to try to teach people ways to reduce the bacteria at least in the drinking water supply very gratifying but I have to say the biggest success for me personally at this point was the fact that the refugees said you are the first institute to come in and not do research on us but do research with us and for us so I was feeling pretty good but about a year ago in a not unusual occurrence Israeli troops came into the camp also not unusual Mohammad was taking pictures this particular soldier didn't want his picture taken so he told Mohammad I want you to put your camera down and stop taking pictures Mohammad responded it's my right as a journalist to take pictures and in fact I'm only shooting you with a camera I'm not shooting you with a gun the soldier proceeded to shoot Mohammad in the eye it pains me to show you this picture but it's a little bit about the courage of this young man he went through two surgeries he's still able to see out of that eye but when he got back into the camp he was put in jail and for unknown reasons and after working with lawyers a month later he was released and when he got out one of the things he said to me you know Annette I was trying to make a joke with that Israeli soldier and he just didn't get it and it's something about that spirit because what he said to me even after all of that you know what Annette we still need water can you help us get water and the truth is the real solution to getting water into the West Bank and Gaza is looking on the other side of the wall this is where SEI is uniquely placed we have built this trust on both sides of the wall I've been working for the past year trying to get a joint proposal between Israelis and Palestinians and it took many months of work and a trust I guess in SEI and what we represent to be able to put forward a joint Israeli-Palestinian proposal on water it felt like I won a battle but unfortunately we didn't win the proposal but like Mohammed with tenacity we're putting a joint proposal and actually expanding this time what if we look at water energy and food and how intricately the interdependent Israel Jordan and Palestine are maybe there's a chance that we can make a difference because I have to tell you my goal I won't stop and Mohammed won't stop until these children can go back to home after school and play instead of collecting water and as Mohammed would say thank you thank you for sharing that very moving story and I told me earlier that this is actually the first time she presented in that way usually it would be more of these typical power points presentations very technical so it was very interesting for us to see this side of the life as a researcher as well but could you just reflect a bit more on how you build that trust in practice and also how we talked about it earlier how to avoid slipping into start taking sides or advocating certain solutions how do you sort of maintain scientific integrity in this kind of situation I guess it's one of those things I should have looked more carefully at my notes because one part of the story is that we're currently doing three projects one in Israel one in Jordan one in Palestine same sort of platform of water and economics each time I go to one of the three countries the question comes up so what's going on in you know Israel and Jordan that's a relatively easy set of questions for me to answer but when I go into Israel the Israeli team asks me what's going on in Palestine and Jordan I tell them the truth and I think it's through years of working together and them seeing who I am who my SEI colleagues are that I say to them in Jordan right now because of the influx of Syrian refugees instead of getting water one day a week they get water four hours a week in Palestine they get water once every two weeks to two months and I have to speak honestly to that it hurts them that there is this kind of divide and I think there's much more motivation on both sides we talk so much about communication and humanity and common good and if there is some way to ignite that more effectively I think there's a lot of good will there if we can learn how to tap into it that sounds promising so thanks again and I'd like to invite our last but not least speaker so we will finish this session with actually connecting back to the team of this morning the sustainability of business supply chains and more specifically we're going to look at the timber supply chain now and the heart of Borneo region again we're making a very big leap from conflicts in the Middle East but I think perhaps there are two common denominators in the past story we heard and this coming one one being the need to satisfy those basic human development needs to make progress on sustainability and on peace and the second one the importance of trust be it between neighbors in a region in conflict or between consumers and producers in the sustainability of a product so here to tell the last story is Peter Rapinski who joined SEI quite recently to broaden our work on sustainable consumption and production he comes with long experience from international environmental policy and capacity building, partnership building from UNEP and other places and SEI he has so far focused on reaching out more to the private sector so Peter. Thank you so much Osa yes we are focusing in this session a lot on the solutions but there's something lurking underneath here the surface something which I think is really a hinder for us in our efforts and in your efforts to deliver towards our common goals and where I also think and hope that SEI can contribute to develop solutions a conservative estimate by the World Bank is that corruption worldwide is a one trillion US dollar industry per year that's about the entire GDP of Australia and this is also in many ways a main cause for environmental degradation the story I would like to share with you is actually not a success story at all it's really a failure story but it's a failure story that has inspired me a lot throughout the work I've done with SEI and others to drill down go further down in the supply chains and try to look at solutions that actually work on the field the story is a glimpse from the illegal timber resource supply chain from the heart of Borneo and it's in many ways going back to square one and in fact I brought a little chair here I was afraid the seats would not be enough but seriously it's a tick chair and I hope with the humor that what I will tell you now is not the history of this chair but to be honest I really don't know I was working for UNEP at that time and the mission we had was to work towards the development of a nature conservation area in Kapuos Hulu which is the Indonesian site West Kalimantan and we did the work together with several different national NGOs another state called the groups and part of the work was to identify also alternative livelihoods for the people living there this is a picture from a traditional longhouse and a traditional dance and when we met with these local people they explained to us the real desperate situation which in many cases is this they lack clean drinking water they lack access to energy to decent sanitation to schools and simply put they are really the victims of poor governance which of course also makes them extremely vulnerable and they don't see many more ways of getting out of these situations then to sell off land to a few thousand dollars and this is an aerial photography and you see the white spots almost is where the land has been cut off but keep in mind one thing logging in this particular part already then was actually illegal so it means first of all this is officially not even going on but it may be curious to understand a bit more how is it actually done if you cut some forest in this remote area what happens with the logs and how do they obviously at the end of the day end up like products so we actually trace the logs throughout the jungle towards the Malaysian border which in this case was a route for this material to leave the Indonesian side but here again it's actually illegal to take logs through the border between Indonesia and Malaysia so what do you do well you cut them in square shapes for definition this is no longer a log you laugh but this is really the situation it was unbelievable to see and on the other side we spotted sawmills which are also illegal but they're still there and here the wood is cut into planks and there is the bribed official that actually stamped these as sustainably harvested forests originating from sustainably harvested forests in Malaysia Sarawak Malaysia and on top of this there is quite a big black market in Indonesia and elsewhere for documents which is then called as wood in shipment of legal origin this in practice enables the wood to go from these protected because they are protected forests to enter the world market as plywood which is not so much maybe in Sweden plywood from these materials but in the US furniture and so on but anyway this must surely just be an exception this is not how it goes on on big scale you cannot really from my leading question you know the answer of that the unfortunate answer of that the illegal logging business is going on at the massive scale in Borneo these are all pictures the last one is a projection and I hope a question mark actually would illustrate I hope it's not going all the way in that direction but only between 85 and 2001 nearly 60% of the protected low land tropical rainforest was actually cut to supply global timber demand that is around 29,000 square kilometers which is about the size of Belgium and even more said what goes on in Borneo is not unique at all for the region in Southeast Asia where I spent the number of years the illegal timber industry in Southeast Asia alone is by UN estimates worth around 3.5 billion US dollars just a little end of this story in jungle I was almost chopped up as well actually and we had an evening when all our armed guards that followed us throughout the jungle all of a sudden they left and two canoes came up with really angry understandably desperate loggers that have been contracted by these companies and obviously we're taking out their livelihoods as they saw it but armed with machetes and with no guards around it was a really stressful evening anyway I'm still alive so I'm here to tell the story and for the record I did not bribe my way out so solutions right not this I hope but I mean even for a business that actually want to do good I think it's extremely hard to ensure an environmental and social secured supply chain all the way to the root to square one and in particular if you're harvesting raw material in developing countries I think it's important that we are not shy away from corruption and its impact on the policies the very policies that we would like to change and from that regard it's of course positive that this is now being discussed as part of the new sustainable development goes but I think it's absolutely necessary that we do drill down to the ground level and that we also see how to proactively strengthen a good governance at the local level and here I think business is really a key role to play and some companies are doing very well others not and I think from a consumer perspective if we buy a product I think we all should demand actually that we get credible advice on the performance of the products and it's been said before but I also think we shouldn't shy away from you know the thing which will switch off my microphone soon maybe we should consider to consume less and maybe we should consume products that that keep longer so what happened with Kapuas Hulu just to end the story it's now it's it is the conservation district Kapuas Hulu but from the last indications that I've seen on the web since I left apparently the legal organ is still going on one of the efforts that were done by the Indonesian government was to reduce the size of which the square shaped logs can be actually taking over the borders to 60 centimeters so I let it up to you to decide whether that's a sustainable solution to this or not thank you so thanks for sharing that story which was a story of failure you said it not positive psychology exactly which we heard about earlier I think we what could SEI do in this field corruption and working with businesses is a new field for us in a way yes I think we can potentially do quite a lot I mean to start off we've talked a lot about bridging science with policy and I think another bridge and there are probably many of them but bridging science with business the vision of SEI and also in particular if you want to contribute to reach out to the various stakeholders that have the positive capacity to create changes on the ground and essentially it's you know maybe boiling down not just 300 pages of scientific text to three pages that makes sense also from a business recipient and how that fits into the overarching business strategies but I think it's also a matter of us to to obviously include corruption maybe more proactively in the work we do and not just take for granted that it's gonna policy recommendation will as good as it may be it's not necessarily generating effects on the ground so I think there are lots of potential so accepting this messy reality rather than contracting an ideal version so to just wrap up we're not gonna provide any elaborate synthesis of these stories they speak very good for themselves unfortunately not all of them have happy endings so far but that means more work to do for the next 25 years so I hand over to Rob thank you very much AUSA and the other speakers that we've just heard I'm going to invite our next panel of speakers to come up straight away to take us into the future and I will introduce them we have Mons Nielsen who is SEI's research director Jopad Granit who is the director of the Stockholm Center and Marie Julisse who is one of our researchers based here in Stockholm and without any further ado I am just simply going to pass straight over to you Mons to kick us off and take us into the future thank you so much Rob first I've been working for SEI for quite a few years and I sometimes have to find myself explaining this to people how come you're still with SEI but I think for this audience I don't have to explain right this has been an amazing day what fantastic stories we can tell but still we are at the 25 years and it's time to take stock are we doing our job have we achieved what we set out to do are we changing things in society and I think there are good news and bad news here I think we've heard some of the good news we have provided what Susan Owens and Carol Weiss calls Enlightenment there have been important concepts that we have put forward into the public domain in the nineties we talked about the great transition scenarios which had an impact on the discourse planetary boundaries greenhouse development rights very important scientifically based concepts that have shaped and coloured the international debate we've also been triggering action as we saw with the climate and clean air coalition and with the UNF CCCC where SEI played an important role in the beginning so there is very good news about our impact here but we can also be a little bit self critical and see are we actually reaching society's most important decision makers with this work and I think this is a challenge that we need to take up because a lot of our work has been geared towards the environmental community environmental policy makers and other researchers interested in environmental issues still economic policies, investments business strategies are being developed without taking much into account all these concepts and ideas that we have put forward so we have been in some ways preaching to the already converted and what we want to do now and what we have to do now is try to take the very difficult step of reaching the non converted to talk to the mainstream decision makers in economic policy business cities etc that need to integrate these considerations into their work so the problem is most of the decision makers judging by how investments are going on today actually don't believe that you can combine their core interests with low carbon development or sustainable development they have not been convinced and we have not been able to reach them now the good news is again it seems like the time is right to actually reach out to them we see that we can make real changes in economic systems in business strategies in investments without damaging the economy and some decision makers are picking up on this and we see an increasing interest from investors from the investment community who work with us as well as governments and not just the ministry for the environment but also other parts of the government so we see over the next 5 year strategy we want to move forward in this direction and instead of staying in this environmental box come out into the real world and the real decisions that are needed to be made and I am going not to present our entire strategy but I will give you a flavor through initiatives that we are preparing right now and that we hope will set the scene for SEI's impact in society over the coming years and these are all doing this reaching out to decision making in different ways deploying some of the key strengths of SEI combining our systems analysis at the nexus between environment and development and responding to real development challenges of real decision makers so the first one and I will just be able to say one word or one sentence producer to consumer sustainability how does the increase in globalization and resource scarcity impact our consumption and the production patterns and the trade in between this is what we heard the first thing this morning from Magnus Bensi and his colleagues where we have some tools at our disposal that can really advance the knowledge base for how these impacts take place oops let's see here next one behavior and choice and we heard from Fiona Lamb and her colleagues how households make decisions on the ground for development options and for different technologies such as sanitation solutions or energy solutions for for instance cook stoves this needs to inform how we create development policies and development strategies to a much larger degree than today when we assume that people behave in a rational economic way for every aspect of their lives the development and disaster risk reduction we heard from Osse before how we can contribute to the new generation of knowledge to enable communities to prepare and cope and respond to risks and hazardous situations around the world our initiative on fossil fuel development and climate change mitigation we've spent quite a lot of work over the last two decades to think about the future and what we're transitioning into but not enough really to consider what we're transitioning out of how do we deal with the majority of the energy system today 80% of the global energy system is fossil fuel the political interests the economic systems, the markets how is this transition going to take place low emissions development pathways we've talked about the climate and clean air coalition we will formulate a big initiative how to better integrate the climate change and the air pollution agendas to create strategic planning in different countries and help to implement this around the world the water energy food nexus how we can develop governance systems, policies and management strategies to deal with interlinkages between the water energy and food systems as we use more and more of these resources in specific regions the resource scarcity and the interdependence are more visible and we have just touched the surface on understanding these sustainable sanitation this initiative will work on sustainable ways to boost sanitation provision focusing on productive solutions where you can find these multiple benefits in terms of health food security, livelihoods poverty alleviation and last but not least climate finance the controversial issues and the political dynamics dealing with global climate financing has been stifling climate change talks for many years this initiative will help untangle this and help prepare and develop better solutions for the international climate finance system so I'll stop there a little taste, I think we have we will not be absolutely sure already today if we can have the impact we want but I think we have never before been so well prepared for this impact in the coming years now I will hand over to Jakob who will explain a little bit how we work thank you so much at this time of the day you must be a little bit curious about how we actually deliver these stories and how we achieve this just a very brief outline on how we work to stem that curiosity we are about 180 colleagues in working in four different regions of the world in North America, Europe in Asia and in Africa 180 people in all together researchers and support and colleagues in finance and administration we have then seven centers that you can see on the map here that are spread around the globe and most of us do work in partnership but we also have some key areas of expertise in each center for example in Stockholm you have heard our team talk about productive sanitation and energy access at the household level looking at climate mitigation adaptation and also now more and more moving into working the private sector and different associations in that domain to understand value chains our team in SCI in Tallinn they are also here present today they have been working since 1992 in support of the transition of Estonia into full EU member country and into a market economy and they have done that focusing quite a lot on the water and energy and environmental issues and they are now taking a step to look into the broader Baltic Sea region so we work with our colleagues to understand the Baltic Sea region development dimension and also towards the Eastern European region and the Eastern partnership for us in the Baltic Sea region in Oxford and in York we have two centers working on vulnerability assessments as you heard very interesting stories on behavioural change the atmosphere science and sustainable consumption and production this is a storyline the consumption and production that is now moving into essentially each center to understand these linkages in Nairobi we have been present now since two years we were before in Tanzania we are focusing very much on energy sustainable pathway and rural and urban livelihoods issues in Asia we have been present for over 10 years now working in the broader region there on resilience issues, vulnerability and climate change and mitigation and finally our teams in US they are based in tree centers they have a very strong background as you heard in economics and in energy transitions and they also deal with our key models where we can model water use and allocation and also long range energy planning both of these type of models are now deployed in most parts of the world in universities and in different government institutions so how then do we actually achieve this we heard I think the unique thing of our institutions that we embed ourselves with the actual users of the knowledge and we tried to frame the research questions together so that means we work very much with government agencies we work very much with regional economic commissions like EU and the South Africa Development Community we spend a lot of work with the international financing institutions like the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank the UN agencies of course UN and UNDP and the civil society the WWF and the other non-governmental organizations and as I said more and more private sector engagement we also really understand the question and frame it together to try to provide jointly the solutions that we have looked at very important for us to be able to deliver results is that we projectize everything we do not work on core resources we source our resources together with partners in most cases and then we deliver it in projects for real results as many other public and government institutions today and non-governmental we are also working very much now to develop a clear understanding of what the outcomes and impacts our work is so that we can learn and the initiatives that you heard right now is a real example of that we have understood what we have been doing we are trying to monitor that and frame the new resource questions to be relevant for the future and as we move into the next phase we will also focus a lot on internal learning very important that we do learn from these different centers that we have around the world so we understand how we can change so with that very brief overview I will hand over to Marie Girisse one of our staff here in Stockholm please thank you Jakob like Mons I have worked my whole career at SEI almost though mine is a bit shorter in this time I have left SEI twice both times thinking this is it I am not coming back the first time was to study in Sweden but like I said I have come back twice and why is this, why is it that drives me to work at SEI I am going to try to answer this question briefly Rob using examples from the last year the first reason that I work at SEI is because it really is an organization that encourages you to leave your comfort zone I am a political scientist by training which means that I am sort of programmed to do policy and up until a year ago I knew quite little about how such policies were implemented but this has all changed in the past 12 months where I have had a chance to do field work focused on cook stoves one of our key issues as you have learned today in India, Kenya and Nepal in this picture it is from doing interviews in a household just outside Udaipur in northern India this new direction was not just sparked by a general interest by a government agency that wanted us to do a project that required both knowledge of international climate policy that is where I came in and actual implementation in introduction of technologies on the ground and that is where my cook stove colleagues came in and projects like these are wonderful for an organization like SEI because it really encourages and even forces us to create new linkages across our areas of expertise and I think in this particular case we realize that by combining different skill sets our work could be much more relevant more fun but essentially as we would find out later much more in demand people started coming to us and asking us to do more of what we did in this particular project which is quite quite cool the reason I work at SEI is because SEI is really an organization that can give you space to test both new ideas and new approaches and ways of working and this is something I've had a chance or opportunity to do in the last year where I co-developed this initiative on behavior and choice one of the eight months mentioned and we received some internal funding to develop this and this internal funding enabled us to do two things the first thing was that we got the time to develop a research platform which really sort of lays out the direction of where we want to take our work the second thing was that it gave us the space to actively engage with partners not just on the results of our studies but on the approach of how, of what questions we're going to be asking so essentially I think the boundary work that Susan Owens was talking about earlier this research platform it's not just fun to have it's not just an intellectual exercise but it means that we can feed in other projects both shorter and longer term assignments that come to us from partners into the initiative meaning that these projects are not just standalone projects but really part of a greater umbrella making the sum of them much much much greater than their individual parts and thanks to this boundary work that we've done in the past couple of months which has involved around 50 conversations with partners on different levels we're very very confident that there is a demand for this type of analysis that we want to do but also we feel ourselves being much better equipped to be quite responsive to partners needs as many of the questions have come up in dialogue with them and the third reason then for working at SEI is that it really does and you've heard it many times today but it really does give you an opportunity to contribute to change on different levels so from on the ground implementation to the highest policy spheres again two examples from the last year in September my colleague Fiona and I were invited with five minutes notice so we're quite nervous when this happened to participate in an internal brainstorming session at the World Bank and it turned out that the aim or goal of this session was to come up with a sort of skeleton for their new household energy strategy so there we were in the room with a bunch of senior World Bank economists quite cool and last week the two of us again spent three days in the western most regions of Nepal the poorest regions working with a Dutch development agency and Nepal's national advisor on renewable energy we visited a cook store project and we had been invited to find out if and how this project was actually strengthening the Nepalese energy sector so again we were there to advise them and pretty cool it's not just cool but we know now that we really are a trusted partner and that we are a trusted partner on different levels and that knowledge that is generated sometimes in an office in Stockholm can actually be applied and be relevant in settings quite far away from it so that said it's and I hope I speak for many of my colleagues when I say that it really is a true privilege to work for SEI it's been it's great particularly because it really is an organization that trusts in each and every single individual's ability to shape their own work and make sure that that work is actually relevant to a larger context so thank you very much SEI I think we're ready for a few more years together now thank you very much Malz, Jakob and Marie we're running a few minutes late we're going to hand over to the chair of SEI's board, Sheshtyn Nibleos to provide us with some hopefully swift and brief concluding remarks Your Majesty, your Royal Highness Your Excellencies Ladies and Gentlemen and dear friends of SEI so we have come to the end of this day of celebrating the Stockholm Environment Institute and its 25 years I would like to extend our warmest thanks to those who have made this event a memorable day in the history of the institute exciting as well as serious interesting and thought provoking first of all thanks to His Majesty it has been a great honor and privilege for us to have your attendance here today your speech showed your genuine interest as well as your vast knowledge about environmental issues going back even beyond the 25 years you reminded us that while the challenges we face are huge there has also been some progress that can give us courage to continue our struggle towards sustainability of course we are very pleased that her Royal Highness Swedish Crown Princess has been here also all this day and shares this interest and dedication thanks also to our collaborators who have told their stories from all over the world ranging in space all over to Latin America and China the Middle East and Hackney and in scale from the local village to the global climate systems analyzing interlinkages in a holistic approach this is the way SCI works and this is why we can provide policy advice and bridge science and policy at different levels thanks also to Susan Owens we are very privileged to have you as a member of our Scientific Advisory Council and you have reminded us how important the scientific basis for everything we do high quality science is key for SCI as indeed for all environmental policy we have highly respected researchers among our staff who work in close contact with universities in the different countries where we are active thanks also to our research director who presented the new 5 year strategy or part of it that is about to be finalized looking into the future I am proud of SCI of our bright and committed collaborators of the role they play in the international climate negotiations and many other arenas of the ranking among environmental think tanks in the world where SCI for several years has been among the top 10 currently actually ranked as number 2 this would not have been possible without the financial support from the Swedish government or governments over the years and to maintain this level and strengthen further our position and the Swedish voice in the world that we try to be we need continued support and we are even hoping for more this government that has such a focus on environment I was involved with SCI at the very beginning as a member of the commission set up by Brigitte Adal I must admit that the way SCI has developed exceeds by far my expectations this development has been possible thanks to the active work made by all timers who are in the audience today and I would like to mention especially of course Brigitte Adal whose initiative must be recognized I hope that Brigitte and the others are satisfied with SCI's development as it is today finally warm thanks to those who worked hard to organize this anniversary our skillful communications team led by Rob Watts and above all our outstanding dynamic executive director this has been a day of encouragement and inspiration now we continue into the next 25-year period with knowledge and confidence but also with respect and a strong feeling of responsibility towards a sustainable future for people and thank you very much Shesh did that concludes the symposium for today we have a cocktail mingle outside on this floor where you had coffee this morning but before you move out I would like to ask you to rise to allow the royal party to leave again warmest heartfelt thanks to His Majesty and the Royal Highness for attending today after they have left don't rush out because the band's coming back and they've got a performance specially for you thank you very much and be part of our future