 Well, welcome to the Stockholm World Water Week at home. I'm very glad to have people participating and we were very happy to be able to run the program. I'm Joan Rose. I'm a professor at Michigan State University and I've been on the program committee and really pleased to be here to kind of host this session on evading food and water crises in the COVID area. Arturo, please say hello to everyone and introduce yourself. Arturo Salavar is our young professional who's been helping us with the sessions. And he has a few guidance to help the session run smoothly. Good evening everyone, so evening from here. I'm in Mauritius currently. So, thank you for joining us. I'm excited for the coming minutes. Well, I will be taking notes along the seminar. And please, I would like to say from which country you are joining us also to tell us your name and your affiliation. So, we will keep record of who are visiting us in our seminar. So, I'm looking forward for these 45 minutes and hearing you. Thank you. Thank you. Yes, if you'll just use the chat, then we'll have a record of who attended and add that information and Arturo will be writing up a small report. Please also use the chat for any comments or questions as we go along. I'm very happy or hoping that the agenda goes smoothly and quickly and we have some time for some discussion and questions after each presentation. So, without further ado, we'll get going. This is our agenda. I'm going to do a very quick introduction. I have our colleagues from the FAO then present some of the key issues that they're dealing with. And they put out some recent reports too so we might be able to add those to our report or in the chat, the link to some of the reports that are of interest. And we'll then have the World Health Organization talk about what they were doing and we'll have some final comments. So, you know, we're all here virtually because we're in a pandemic. The virus, the Corona virus or the SARS COVID-2 is part of a family of viruses that has a RNA nucleic acid. It's unique. The Corona Viridae family has an envelope layer with glycoproteins. I think this virus is the most well-known virus by the public because we see it on the television with all the spikes on it. This group of viruses and found in a lot of humans and animals. And the first common cold Corona virus was actually identified in 1932. Of course, we've had several other global outbreaks from viruses in this family, the SARS, which occurred in 2003, and then MERS. And these are still, some of this disease is still with us. It didn't, these viruses didn't spread as globally and as quickly as this one has. We always watch the Johns Hopkins Resource Center to look at what's happening. This is some of the data on confirmed new cases around the world. You can see that we're, we had a small increase. We have a lot of people in the United States. We sort of leveled off. And then as we opened back up, we had very high increase in cases in other parts of the United States. The first part of it was in New York. And the second part of this increase, you know, has been occurring in many states around the US. You can see that Brazil also has been struggling. India has been struggling with these increases. And many other countries while they had some devastating increases early on have been able to bring this to more steady state, but we are seeing these second waves. There's a lot of concern about the fall coming up because of the flu season and then this virus might overlap with that. Now, we found out that this virus likes to infect a lot of different organs in the body. And this is related to some of the disease that we're seeing. Of course, this pneumonia and inability, you know, to breathe a high hospitalization rates and mortality rates associated with its colonization of the lungs. But we also found that it colonized the intestinal tract. And in fact, we now know that this virus is excreted in feces and it ends up in wastewater. For those of us and I'm an environmental microbiologist, I didn't actually introduce myself except that I'm from Michigan State University. I'm an environmental virologist and public health microbiologist. I study organisms that are spread through water. While we don't believe SARS is waterborne, some of the methods we've used are we're using now to detect this virus in wastewater. We now have 40 published studies around the world that are looking at the occurrence of the virus in wastewater. And as you can see, the work in Amsterdam by my colleague, Dr. Uttan Uttan Medama, was able to provide early warning. That is a look into the community infection, understanding the cases before, you know, before it was observed in the community. So the goal is whether we can use COVID monitoring wastewater around the world to help understand the disease in our communities. We see that we do need to have more monitoring in certain parts of Africa. But this is quickly becoming a sort of a shared network approach to try to get coverage of understanding the disease and how fast it's it's transmitting. Of course, this disease has disrupted our essential services. And of course, access to save water and access to food as seen as essential. And how do we handle all of this in various parts of the world as the disease moves into our communities. And I think this is what our distinguished speakers are going to present. So we're going to have the FAO present next and the WHO. Secondly, we'll end with, I guess a few closing words. So I would like to give you a quick introduction to our speakers. We have Patricia Nes, who's with the FAO. She specializes in land and water, works in that division. And she's an agricultural engineer, and she has 15 years experience in improving access and management of water and agriculture and addressing food security and poverty reduction. You know, Patricia, you work all over the world. It's really amazing. And so we're really looking forward to your insights on how this is disrupted or maybe even enhanced your programs, this whole issue of a global pandemic. Her colleague, Marlos, is in the Water Resources Management program. He's come from Australia, he's gotten his degrees in Australia, worked in Brazil, you know, joined the FAO in 2015. And again, he's leading a team on integrated nexus of water management for food security. And Marlos has really interested that you, you know, link that whole idea of management at the watershed scale to what we do on the land. And you have a lot of experience with that. So our final speaker will be Kate Metalcott from World Health Organization. She is a team leader of the sanitation and wastewater or wash group. She works in Geneva, but I know that she goes all over the world as well. She's been translating evidence into policy and practice. She's been developing guidelines. She's been working with the health sector, the sanitation sector and sort of merging that. And Kate, how long have you been with, I wasn't sure how long you've been with WHO, but I know you've been there helping their guidelines for, you know, the last five years. I've been coming up to eight years in Geneva and three years. Eight years. Okay. I knew you'd been there quite a bit of time helping with the guidelines. Now all of a sudden you're dealing with this, this pandemic. So I'm going to stop here. I guess, Patricia, if you'll share your, your screen, I'm going to give over the floor to you. So thank you, John, and good morning or good afternoon to all the participants. I'm going to share my screen so I can show the presentation. So I hope it's visible. Can you, can you see it? Okay. Yes, it looks great. Okay, so we are going to talk about the COVID impact in, in the food crisis. And also, which are the responses that FAO is, is, is preparing from, from the water sector in rural areas. And many of you maybe know that the, the number of people suffering from, from hunger has been increasing in the last years. And, and the COVID crisis is, is aggravating, deepening this, this crisis and the number of, of hungry people. So in, in our presentation, I'm going to, to, to show the latest estimates on the number of food insecurity and the impacts of COVID. Talking about to, to, to reports from, from FAO and, and other partners. And then my colleague, Marlos de Sousa is going to talk about what are the solutions that may come from, from the water sector in agriculture. So I'm going to talk first about a report that many of you may know it's the state, the report on the state of food security and malnutrition in the world, also known as Sophie. This is a very important report for FAO, which is elaborated with other four UN agencies such as WTO, EFAD, WT and UNICEF. So in July 2020, we launched this report and, and, and the numbers were analyzed before the crisis of COVID. And I'm going to present which, which are the key messages. So the first message is that the war hunger is still increasing. As I, as I said, the number of people affected by hunger has been on a rise since 2014. So in 2019, there were nearly 619 million people hungry. So that represents 9% of the world population. It also means that in one in one year, the population suffering from from hunger has, has rising up by 10 million people in one year and by nearly 60 million in five years. If we, if we look at the regional perspective, this number is highest in, in, in Asia with 381 million hungry, and it's rising, rising very fast in Africa, you know, with 250 million hungry. So as a conclusion, the work is not on track to achieve zero hunger by 2030. And, and this report also provides some projections that say that if the, if the trends continue, the number of people affected by hunger will surpass 840 million by 2030. And with Africa overtaking Asia as the region most affected by food insecurity and hunger. So these are the figures before COVID. So, and we can see that these are alarming figures and we see that the, that they were hunger is, is increasing every year. But also beyond hunger, the report says that over 2 billion people do not have regular access to safe nutrition and sufficient food. So the work is not on track also when we talk about malnutrition. And while there is, there has been some progress in, in child spanting and breastfeeding, child overweight is, is not improving and adult obesity is rising. So these are the figures before COVID and the report also gives some projections on what will be the impact of COVID-19. So the, there have been some analysis on the impact of COVID in, in, in food security. So they've been analyzing different scenarios, taking into account the GDP decrease in different countries. So the analysis says that, that the COVID pandemic may add as many as 132 million people to the total number of hungry only in 2020. And also the nutritional status of the most vulnerable is likely to deteriorate further due to COVID-19. So we are in a very serious situation where a lot of people are vulnerable to food insecurity. I would like to say that the data that are provided by Sophie are the data that relates to chronic food insecurity. That means the long-term difficulties for people to access food. But there is another report that was also launching in July, a joint report by FAO and WP, which looks more at the emergency situation. It's a report on early warning analysis of acute food insecurity. So it has looked at the countries which are more vulnerable, which are more at risk of suffering from acute hunger. And if you see the map, this is the result of the analysis that has been done. You see using the map, the countries in red, which means that are hotspots countries, which were probably there will be a high number of people suffering from acute food insecurity. We see very clearly that Africa is the region which has the largest vulnerable countries, but there is also some red countries in Latin America and Asia and the Middle East. Another important thing is that Sophie and this early warning report analyzes which are the main drivers for this vulnerability. One main driver is the conflict, another is the economic downturn, but the third driver, which is very important, is the access to water. So the changes in the climate, the driest cells. This is a very important driver that makes countries very vulnerable to food security. And this is why we think that the water sector and improving the water management is key in the response for COVID-19. So now I'm going to give the floor to my colleague, Marlos, who's going to talk about which programs may be in place in the different countries as a solution for COVID from the water sector. Thank you. Thank you, Patricia. And good evening or good morning or good night for everyone. So COVID is giving us a chance of opening the doors for a lot of people to attend the World Water Week, but usually you don't have the opportunity to travel the way to stop and to participate. So this year, I'd say because of the COVID, we are more integrated in this regard. So I think Patricia gave some numbers of what's going on and the impact of COVID. One thing we have been discussing a lot internally and usually I discuss it with a number of people in terms of the importance of water for agriculture. So I sometimes make a joke with my colleagues from the soil part of FAO's business saying that we can produce food without soil, but there is no way of producing food without water. So water has been central to our discussion here. So the previous slide, we had what we produced or we launched during the first month of the first month of the COVID-19 impact is a policy brief by FAO that was led by our division in terms of integrates agricultural water management and health. So the point we are discussing here is really to incorporate the water management into this process of protecting health, but not just the health of people, the health of animals and the health of the environment. So then in this regard, we came with this new program at FAO called One Water, One Health is where we are putting together this concept that usually people, they face the One Health concept, you are extending it to One Water, One Health. The idea is really to integrate the whole management of water in a way that we do have this impact of water on health of people, animals and the environment. So the recommendation we have here under this integrated agricultural water management and health or this new program of FAO is really how to manage water in a way that we can try to avoid future diseases to be spread or improve the resilience of those being packed by this is like the COVID-19 at the moment. So for a long time now, since we started the pandemic, we have heard a lot about washing our hands, going around the globe to see that still 2.2 billion people, they don't have access to water to do it, not daily base. So for us, really, it's a challenge of, you know, and a challenge to understand and how to incorporate those new things and how FAO, together with the member states, how we could help, you know, those countries, especially the ones left behind, but then really to face the pandemic and to be more resilient. So, Patricia, if you can go to the next one, please. To the next slide. I'm not working. I may try to use mine here then hold on a second. Okay. So, in this regard, we developed a number of response coming from the land of the water division. So we are on Monday at FAO is to propose and to manage water in my way, you know, for implementing the mandate of the organization. So we launched a response coming from the land and water division together with a response coming from different parts of FAO as well. It's not just about our division. They have several divisions from FAO that they are doing exactly the same. You know, they prepared response for the pandemic for what's going on at the moment around the globe. And what you have in front of you is the response prepared by the land and water division from our division. So you go to the left there we have a number of programs that we launched during this period to help countries to be more resilient to the problems they were facing from home gardens, for example, for composting of solar powered energy for irrigation systems, and so on. But then today says we do have a very, you know, limit time for us to go through. I select two that I think, going to go very well to do with the discussions today. So one is the circular economy and how it applies for ways to resource and the COVID-19 pandemic. And the second one is about water quality and food safety and COVID-19. So the first one when we're talking about circular economy, I think for most of you, it's not, you know, something new. We have heard about this concept before the discussions and how to implement it, especially in the cities. That means, however, here, what we have been proposing to countries and to member states is really to understand that we can apply the same circular economy for agriculture at the farm level, that they can be more resilient to the problems they're facing now. I don't know if, you know, most of you has been following up or going with farmers, for example. Some of them that has been heavily impacted with the logistics of moving production out of the gate from what they have been producing to take the production to come and to reach us in the cities for us to be able to buy food, for example. And some of those that they have been heavily impacted by logistics because they cannot import inputs that they need for the everyday of farming, for example, fertilizers. So I was chatting with a friend of mine in Brazil that he told me about what's going on in the A&M when he stayed in Brazil that they used to export almost the whole production of melons to Europe. But they have all to be moved from Brazil to Europe by airplanes with the COVID-19 and stopping almost 100% of the aviation industry. They couldn't move it out from the country. So producers, they had a big production on their hands and they were heavily impacted by logistics. So on the other hand, as I said, some others, they need fertilizer for keep cropping and they couldn't get the hands of fertilizers. They have been impacted by a lack of energy and some other things. So the idea of implementing the circular economy at this level is that farmers, you know, and urban, imperial, urban agriculture, they can use those resources that usually be produced. Not just at the farm level, but at the city level as well. So to reuse, treat the waste of water in agriculture, for example, but to reuse manure that's produced in livestock enterprise globally that nowadays they are not treated or not reused in a safe way that can be safe to the environment, and safe for those that are touching or managing manure as a bio fertilizer. So the whole idea we are proposing here for member states is really to use circular economy in two different scales, a city scale, as well as to move it at a farm scale to help farmers to be more resilient. Most of the farmers, they really, if they apply the circular economy approach, they'll be able really to be more resilient in terms of price. So, and the second one that I was talking before is about water quality and health. So most have been said about the impacts of agriculture on water quality. So, even for FAO recently, you know, I think it was last year or two years ago, we launched Dunige Wood Water Week, we launched another publication talking about the impact of agriculture on water quality. But not a lot of people, they discussed the impact of water quality on agriculture and how those impacts, they can translate, you know, to impacts on the health of people, the health of animals and the health of the environment. So nowadays, what we have been flagging and this program of water quality and health is trying to achieve is to really to manage both, to manage the source of pollution coming from agriculture and getting to the environment. So, there you can see one of the latest publications between FAO, WHO and OIE in terms of antimicrobial resistance and how antimicrobial resistance moving from, you know, a case in agricultural area or agricultural land, getting to the environment, it can really be a problem for human health and animal health. So, creating superbacteria that in the future won't be able to treat is a big problem. So, in this regard, we are trying working together with other organizations like WHO and OIE in terms of preparing guidance and helping countries to understand the impacts they have in those activities and how we can work together with, you know, tailored solutions and actions they can take trying to mitigate them to avoid the problem altogether. But as I said, we have impacts caused by water quality agriculture as well. For example, livestock, for example, livestock they can lose up to 25% in weight for the beef industry because of bad water quality. It's just one impact that they may have in animals and they can have in the business of the beef industry. So, but it goes on. So, what we have been working now and is new program area of FAO is to work from the source to the fork as what we have been calling it. So, the source where we do have the water quality being used by farmers for different reasons for irrigation, for example, for livestock and how this quality of water can impact the whole chain of food production. So, coming from where it has been produced to go through all the process of being processing by the industry or getting to markets to be sold at markets. So, in all of those elements, we're going to see that water has a role to play in this process. So, in this regard, we have been working several ways to understand the impact of water quality on agriculture and food production and food safety. One is by understanding, for example, using now genome tracking, first to understand the movement from, you know, pathogens from water becoming coming from waterborne disease to become probably foodborne disease. And from there to be going all the way through the food chain to get to other place and provoke, you know, health issues. And to some nuclear techniques to understand how AMI is moving through the environment and getting to agricultural areas and causing problems as well for livestock or for apaculture or fisheries. So, it's another technique that we are planning to apply and help countries to understand in this way of doing surveillance where the problem is in how they can manage it. Thank you for the time being. I think I'm going to talk here for us to have a discussion, but thank you very much for the time and look forward for the discussion. Thank you, Joanne. Thank you. I think there was just, you know, one comment in the chat. And it was about the scale of the impact on food, food security and, and this increase in, you know, millions of people that are going hungry versus water. Especially under this, this COVID, you know, under the pandemic and it does seem like maybe the food chain, the food supply chain is more susceptible to disruption. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for, you know, Patricia can compliment as well, but from what we have been looking at, from contacts we have in countries and exchanging ideas of what's going on, discussing what's going on at the moment with with our counterparts. You see as the example used before the impact on logistics. So as they cannot export the food they have. And even if they do have the logistics of getting to the port. So they need to get ships to go there and to collect the food and to transport it from one port to another one. When you get to another port, we have all the restrictions from the receiving port. So they have maybe to go to quarantine and other things and then after you have to move it by land. So they have been heavily impacted. I think some companies that they need to report most of their food are the most impact to us. Right. So the ones they're producing more, for example, the example I used before from Brazil. So the problem they have now is for some farmers which put the product, the produce they have, they cannot sell it. You know, they would be able to. Right. So it disrupts their economy as well. Absolutely. It seems like, Patricia, those that have local capabilities are have some resilience under this pandemic. I mean, we have to look at the two sides. One is also the production side that will be affected by the lack of inputs or the lack of market accessibility, but also from the other side that a lot of people are losing their jobs and for poor people, they depend on informal jobs. So they have less power to buy food and nutritious food in general. And we have also to think about the migrants, all the displaced people that they cannot move now. They have restrictions to move across the borders. That has also be a big impact for every culture because they are not able to work for their work in every culture. Yeah, that's certainly been a very big deal, even in the United States, for sure. Well, I know we're running on a timetable here and I think I'll turn it over to Kate to give her presentation from WHO and then we'll have some final comments. Kate, we'll let you share your screen. Thank you. John, you can see that? Yes. Yes, we can. Wonderful. Okay. So, yeah. I just want to give you an overview of the the wash response to COVID and then zoom in a bit on this issue of environmental surveillance. Okay, so just firstly on the figures, maybe you're all very familiar with this, we're coming up on 23, 24 million cases and over 800,000 deaths. I think everybody's getting very tired of some of the control measures and less compliant with them. Unfortunately, everything sort of points to this pandemic being being, you know, far from over yet. So in terms of the response, there's three main guiding documents, you see them here. And from, we're all kind of wash people on this call, I think, or water sector people and perhaps the linkages with water are very obvious. I think from the public health community, who are, you know, thinking about that diagnostics, case finding, treatment options, vaccine development, some of the wash elements are not so obvious. So we really need to be making sure that we're making the case for wash and you'll see now that it's included in these five ways within the key recommendations. So of course, you know, maintaining essential wash services, allowing hand hygiene, especially for vulnerable households, and very much so in healthcare facilities, making sure we're thinking not just about provision of facilities, but of course, behavior change. I think many of us are guilty of having perfectly good hand washing facilities, but for whatever reasons not practicing that behavior. So in terms of where we're at with wash, what is the kind of ground we've landed on with this pandemic? Again, I think many of you will be familiar with these numbers, 30% without safe water at home, 2 billion without even basic sanitation, 3 billion people without hand hygiene facilities at home. It's really a shocking number. And likewise, 42% of healthcare facilities don't have a hand hygiene facility at the point of care, which really begs the question, can you even call it the health facility? If you don't have that really basic means of infection prevention? And the new schools report has just come out as well with the figures you see here. More than 40% of schools don't have basic hand hygiene facilities. So when we're thinking about coming out of lockdown and how we maintain hygienic conditions that will prevent transmission, there's some really big challenges there. And that among other reasons is why we've launched the hand hygiene for all initiative in June of this year. Really looking at scaling up hand hygiene in all of these settings, healthcare facilities, workplaces, public places, refugee camps, around these four kind of focal areas and a whole of society engagement with a lot of partners getting on board with that. Of course, because it's one of the most effective things that we can do to prevent COVID transmission, but also actually because it's been something that we've been rather shamefully neglecting in the wash sector for some time and that really is reflected in those figures I just showed you. So in terms of what we do on wash for COVID, naturally with a new pathogen, there's a sense that oh, do we need to do something really different. In fact, based on what we know about this virus, in fact all of our existing guidance holds. Of course, frequent hand hygiene, environmental cleaning using disinfectants, the existing water and sanitation guidance for the drinking water quality and sanitation. But also really making sure that these wash investments are central to the overall response and recognizing that this isn't just a short term wash response to COVID. Actually, there's huge co-benefits for infectious disease of making these improvements. So we need to be thinking about long term infrastructural enabling environment and behavior change interventions. Okay, Joan sort of touched a bit on this, but I wanted to kind of talk a bit about what we know about the presence of the COVID virus and feces and infectivity because this really impacts a lot on the types of response options we choose understandably. So it's an envelope virus and quite often when you hear envelope virus, do you think oh, that might be quite a tough virus, but in fact it's quite fragile in the environment and becomes quite quickly deactivated. And although there's been detections of the virus and feces, very few of them are active infective virus, the very small percentage. So the risk of transmission from feces from an infected person appears to be very low. Likewise, when it comes to surfaces, the white ones you see here, those are similar coronaviruses. And the last one is looking specifically at this virus with what we had previously known to be around two to nine hours survival time in the environment. What seems to be emerging is that the kind of medium half-life of about 1.2 hours, which is kind of worth reflecting on in terms of how we respond, you know, holding up ships of food that have been at sea for a lot longer than that period is perhaps not a rational response to COVID control. So we really have to make sure we're putting our efforts into the things that are going to make a difference for transmission. In terms of wastewater, again, so while we're finding these RNA within wastewater, it hasn't been, infectious virus has not been detected in untreated or treated wastewater and likewise drinking water. So the risks of transmission of COVID through drinking water, through feces, through sanitation systems is very low. Which is not to say we shouldn't be doing all the things we need to do to make those systems safe anyway, but we shouldn't be worried about additional risk of COVID and existing guidance applies. But I wanted to sort of transition now to this work on wastewater surveillance, which has really interesting potential to complement the wastewater surveillance. So picking up these RNA fragments in wastewater is a useful tool in the overall response. So getting to that topic now, there's an awful lot happening in the space. The research is moving very fast and I'm sure Joan will pull me up if anything I've said right here is out of date. But these are some of the key resources if you're interested in it and some of the key networks. What I'd like to do is just summarise some of the key takeaways from the WHO scientific brief that was published earlier this month. So firstly what you see here from the website I gave the link to is the many collaborations that are happening at the moment. So it's a really global effort. It's probably skewed I would say towards higher income countries for higher sewage coverage. But there are some pilot work underway in countries that have a greater percentage of onsite sanitation services, which is kind of important methodologically and in terms of the interpretation results. So as I said, this is progressing really quickly and it's also been used in the polio eradication program very successfully and I hope you've kind of joined me in celebrating the huge success that was announced yesterday with the eradication of wild polio in Africa. So these kind of environmental surveillance tools can have a very powerful role to play in disease control and elimination. That said, for COVID we're kind of at the early stages understandably. But what seems to be emerging as the ways that this can complement the response is firstly is an early warning which was Joan mentioned maybe three to five days early warning. Detection to in locations where there's limited clinical surveillance so that would be not an alternative to clinical surveillance but it may be a trigger to do more in depth testing. I'm thinking of things like like prisons like informal camps like isolation facilities and so forth. And monitoring of circulation in the community. It's interesting but sort of inconclusive work that's been done on retrospective analysis and of course research for its own sake which is also important for us to learn more. I'm trying to rush now because I see Joan is not her video on. Okay, but there's some considerations that we need to kind of think about before this can really be put into practice. The first is representation of the big thing being what do we do in countries before sewer coverage coordination is absolutely key. We have to figure out how this complements the wider public health response. We need to be really clear about you know is this additional investment worthwhile what's it telling us and that needs some evaluation. Some legal medical considerations but actually lower because the information is pulled and we need to work on quality assurance so establishing protocols and approaches that can be standardized over time. Lastly, the point I wanted to finish on is on safety. There's many kind of people out there and that and practice particularly sanitation workers who hear of this work and maybe afraid that they may be going to catch COVID from wastewater because it's being detected in wastewater through this surveillance. So we need to be really clear with the public stakeholders about the infection risk. So thank you very much sorry I took a little long back to you, Joan. No worries. I didn't. Let's see we've got one question for you. What are the roles of the wastewater management water consultants in helping to prevent the disease transmission. Kate, have they have they come together with a, you know, with an approach. I mean, you mentioned access access to water just to wash your hands right. Yeah, well consultants are kind of working across the huge range of topics. So I'm not sure what you mean specifically but but there's this huge need for technical advice both on of all types you know on the behavior change on the infrastructure development around around hand hygiene around the central services around the surveillance approach and WHA works for the sort of a limited pool of consultants on various topics related to this. But our main investment in consultancy has been around the hand hygiene initiative. Yeah, I think it's really interesting how it's really shown a spotlight on, you know, that we need to we need to speed up what we're doing so that people actually have access to safe water. It's going to be important. And it's it's really shown, you know, there's a spotlight on that. And then I just look over that I would say but no but for all pandemics right we can't. We just have a response mode and be more prepared with these essential services for all infectious disease outbreaks. And I think it's a challenge for both food security and water safety and these middle and low income countries and implementing surveillance and implementing, you know, strategies to improve resilience. And I know we're running over but I would like to give everyone, you know, just, you know, 30 seconds of your, your big take home message. Marlos, what's your, your big take home message to the group. The big one for me and from my work here at FAO is that COVID is showing us that, you know, we need to be to be or to become more resilient ourselves, you know, close to where we are and especially to consume food that's produced nearby. So then at least we can diminish a lot of the impacts we may have and to learn how to, you know, to really to reuse everything we are producing in terms of waste nowadays and to become resource that we can be more resilient when we do have impact. Such the COVID that stops everything. Oh, this is my take. Yeah. Patricia. I think after the presentation of the trends on food insecurity and the impact of COVID. I think it's clear that there is an urgent need to respond to these, to these challenges. So before COVID the situation was already very alarming. Now the situation is even worse. And there are many countries that are very, very much vulnerable to food insecurity. We've also seen that Africa is particularly, the situation in Africa is particularly alarming. We've seen that the numbers are rising very quickly and that there are many countries which are hot spots, hot spots for, for, for acute food insecurity. So I think there are two, two pathways to, for the governments to add. One is the emergency to respond to the emergency and to provide food, food assistance to, to people in vulnerable situations. But there is also another pathway which is important, which is to, to maintain and to, to increase the resilience of food systems. And for that, water management and water access and access to drinking water and sanitation now is really very important. So thank you. Yeah, thank you Patricia. And Kate, I'll give you the last word to give us your final thoughts. Well, I would just like to point out a milestone that's coming up. Global hand washing day is on 15th of October. That gives you kind of six weeks to really think about what you can do and what, whatever capacity you're in to, to put a spotlight on hand hygiene. Start building hand hygiene into, into your programs, whether that's in communities, your workplaces, public places, whether it's behavior change, technology, financing, all of those things are needed. It's a real, all hands on deck kind of situation for the wash sector. So take these next six weeks to plan how you can really make a splash on, on global hand washing day and beyond, of course. Thank you. Yes. And, and we should say congratulations to the world for eradicating polio. That's amazing and it's difficult to do anything like that. And here we are in this middle of a global phenomenon right now and, and it's really been amazing to me how the global world and network, including, you know, you know, platforms that stock home, you know, provides has brought, you know, people together to try to solve this at the global scale to help the local, you know, help the local people. I have to finish the final plug on sanitation, though, because while that is incredible achievement for polio, as long as we have poor sanitation systems, there's there's a risk of a rebound of polio. So that's super important that we stay on that task. Yes, absolutely. We go, we focus more and getting that SDG six on reuse for food, moving forward as well, and solve two problems at the same time. So thank you all for joining us. And we'll have a report and we'll have this seminar up on the website. So enjoy the rest of the Stockholm World Water Week at home, and thanks for joining us.