 Good afternoon, everybody, depending on which place on earth you are located. We are extremely happy to be given this plenary session to present the results of the UN SDSN Senior Working Group on the European Green Deal. I am a professor of the Athens University of Economics and Business and the Technical University of Denmark, and also leading the Sustainable Development Unit of the Athena Research Centre on Information Technologies. I'm also chairing the SDSN Global Climate Hub and SDSN European Hub. In these very difficult times of multiple crises, the pandemic, the economic recession together with increasing inflation lately, the climate change crisis, the biodiversity collapse, the 2021 energy crisis that has been even more aggravated by the geopolitical crisis in the Ukraine and the resulting food crisis, the population crisis and the increasing inequality around the world gives a very difficult picture of the status quo of the global economy and society, and the interaction of these two with the environment and really put us on a stagnating position with regards to the implementation of the only global agenda. The Sustainable Development Goals, the 17 SDGs, 169 targets, this is how the performance across the world at national level looks like. We are far behind with regards to implementing the goals and we need to find solution pathways that will accelerate the process of implementation. Because the SDGs are not just a description of the world we would like the future we want. The SDGs are an investment program that should be specified for each nation according to the idiosyncratic features of each and every country. It is an investment plan and the performance with regards to this investment plan can be quantified and assessed and monitored. And within this framework, the senior working group of the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network on the European Green Deal, every year is producing a report on financing the joint implementation of the SDGs and the European Green Deal. We are trying to identify the synergies, the correlation, the connection between what is being done in Europe and the implementation of the global agenda as it is presented in the 17 Sustainable Development Goals. This senior working group is led by Jeff Sachs and myself and includes many important institutions around the globe. In addition to the Sustainable Development Solutions Network, the European Association of Environmental Resource Economics, for which I'm the elected president, IFORIA, the Alliance of Excellence for Research and Innovation on IFORIA, the Association of Research Institutions, Innovation Accelerators, and Science Policy Interface Networks, and Academies and Associations that tries to sketch science-driven pathways to sustainability. With us, we have NL Foundation, EIT Climate Kick, Force for Good, the International Energy Agency, the World Academy of Art and Science, the University of Rome, the Psyprecision Institute, the Athens University of Economics and Business, and Athena Research Center. Together we have with us, and I'm very honored that the prominent members of this working group, the people who are putting the hours and the thoughts and the effort and their team to support this annual report are with us and you can see them on the screen to present the results of the section that they contributed to the report. So we have Professor Leonardo Becchetti from the University of Rome, Kedan Paddel, CEO of Greater Pacific Capital and founder of Force for Good. Me, Silenia Romani, PhD, from the Foundatione, and Eriko de Matei from FIM, and Professor Deodoros Zahariadis from the Cyprus Institute and manager at SDSM Europe, where we also work together. Now, basically what we've tried to do in the first chapter of this report is to connect the global and European network, which are global and European array of policies and initiatives and laws and regulations, and try to find the connection between them and the connection between whatever is happening in Europe that is considered a leadership example for the sustainability transition and the SDGs. So what is the connection between the 17 sustainable development goals and the 169 targets, the Paris Agreement, the global agreement for climate change of a sign in 2015 by all members of the UN trying to keep the increase in average global temperature below two degrees and even below 1.5 degrees Celsius as it has proven to be necessary in the 2018 IPCC report. So we have the European Green Deal with the aim for climate neutrality and clean tech leadership of European companies and reduction of pollution and leaving no one behind. We have the next generation EU, which is 750 billion in addition to the European multi-annual financial framework enacted in 2020 when we had COVID. And this 750 billion thankfully we managed even within the era of this huge COVID-19 non-linearity, we managed to earmark this 750 billion to the green and digital transition. And then in 2021 we have a further elaboration of the nine European Green Deal policies and various relevant strategies. We have the announcement of the European climate law, the EU taxonomy, the fit for 55, and in 2022 the efforts of the European Union to address the energy crisis and the geopolitical crisis, mainly transposing to repower EU focusing on independence from Russia and fossil fuel, supply change, security and interconnectivity, and investing in renewables. Together with that, a huge initiative destination Earth to create the digital twin of Europe. We seem to be quite focused on the green and digital transition. There is a huge array of policies initiatives, directives, regulations, laws, etc. And we want to see how closely this framework of policies is related to the SDGs. We grouped all these policies together, these make up hundreds of thousands of pages, and we posed the question, do European Green Deal policies facilitate the implementation of the SDGs? And we tried two methods to, in order to answer these questions, we had a human text mining and machine learning text mining. In the human text mining approach, we find that the most significant impact of the European Green Deal policies. It refers to accelerating climate adaptation, SDG 13, refers to SDG 9, which is about sustainable industry innovation and infrastructure, SDG 7 affordable and clean energy, SDG 12 responsible consumption production, and SDG 8 decent work and economic growth. In our deep learning approach, using these very large neural networks with many layers that basically simulate the way the human mind works, we find that the European Green Deal facilitates affordable and clean energy, SDG 7, industrial innovation and infrastructure, SDG 9, SDG 12, responsible consumption protection, SDG 13 climate action, and SDG 17 partnerships for the goals. So there is a consistency between the two text mining approaches, but the deep learning approach also gives us the result that we have very low correlation with regards to the social cohesion SDGs. The European Green Deal is not efficient, is not effective, is not clever enough to integrate the goals of no poverty, quality education, gender equality, which are important for social cohesion. The thing is, rings a bell of non-cohesion, non-social cohesion, which translates to the fact that the just transition, the inclusiveness access of the European Green Deal is not really transposed in any of the policies, or is transposed in the policies, but to a lower than necessary degree. To showcase this a bit more clearly, we use the six transformation operationalization framework of the SDGs, which basically maps the 17 goals into six transformation, education, health, energy, decarbonization, sustainable food, long water and ocean, sustainable cities and communities, and the digital revolution for sustainable development. And what we find when we try to transpose our resource into these six transformation framework, we find an additional confirmation that the European Green Deal policies are quite robust in facilitating transformation for that refers to sustainable food, long water and oceans and transformation three with regards to energy, decarbonization, sustainable industry. It's moderately efficient in facilitating sustainable cities and communities and the digital revolution for sustainable development, but it is quite weak with regards to education and health, well-being and demographic. So we find that the SDGs are a more holistic framework that the European Green Deal. So we really need a joint implementation of the European Green Deal and the SDGs in the bigger framework of the SDG that takes good care of social cohesion. So one could follow the lead of the Minister of Infrastructure and Sustainable Mobility of Italy and basically implement the European Green Deal but assess each and every investment that is there to enable the implementation of the European Green Deal against all the SDGs. So that we choose the projects that are good for energy efficiency and decarbonization and protecting natural resources and the digital transformation but at the same time they care about social cohesion without social cohesion. No transformation is possible without social cohesion. You cannot convince the adoption of the technologies and the new governance structures that are needed for the transformation. The second question that we suppose is does the European semester process facilitate the implementation of the SDGs. And basically what we did, we used the connection between SDGs and the European Green Deal and then we tried to see whether the challenges faced by each and every country in Europe with regards to their SDG performance are being dealt with via the semester process recommendation of the European Commission. The semester process recommendation gives recommendations with regards to fiscal policies and investments in green and digital transition, taxation, social policies, education, skills, public administration and so on. So what we try to do is to see whether in the areas where you have very low performance with regards to the SDGs, the areas that are marked on the left hand side of this slide as red or orange or even yellow are areas where the semester process gives recommendations to the country, i.e. it says you need to invest more on these areas in order to come closer to the European average. And we find that in Sweden we have 50% alliance in Germany, 63% in Greece, 80% and in looking at the different 27 European countries we find 72% alignment which is high, but there is obviously still space for further alignment. The National Recovery and Resilience Plans facilitated the implementation of the SDGs. Well, Theo Zahariadis will tell you much more about this derived from his work on the seven South European countries, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Greece, Italy, Slovenia and Spain. The message from this work is that the stimulus managers and the budget allocation of the recovery and resilience funds are of course facilitating SDG performance and implementation, but they are not always those on which the countries face the biggest sustainability challenges. We find that the biggest sustainability challenges that refer to sustainable food systems and diets, biodiversity goals are not addressed in RFFs while a lot of money, a lot of investment is placed on green energy electrification of transport and energy efficiency measures. This rings the bell to the national governments indicating the need for additional cohesion funds that are anyway coming in to be spent on areas that are relevant to transforming food systems diets and biodiversity goals. The sustainable finance have a good structure in Europe and is it really integrating the value of natural capital as we all know in order to produce something you need to produce capital, natural capital and human capital. And it has been proven in the last 50 years through various studies on non-market valuation of natural capital that almost always the biggest component of value in production processes derives from the value of natural capital. And here is a big need to identify, quantify and monetize the value of natural capital. And in this report we propose a method by categorizing the different services of natural capital in the so called ecosystem services provision in regulating culture and habitat services, and then using the econometric methodologies that allow us to monetize to identify the willingness to pay of people of households in order to conserve or increase the quantity and the quality of these ecosystem services. And we do this for terrestrial marine and freshwater ecosystem services for all the biogeographical and marine regions of Europe 14 regions. And we do a meta analysis benefit transfer that allows us to estimate the marginal willingness to pay by ecosystem service by each household in each and every country of Europe. And not only that, we also investigate the correlation between willingness to pay for natural capital and SDG performance and we find a very strong positive correlation which indicates that in countries where there is strong awareness of the value of natural capital, and there is explicit willingness to pay for the services of natural capital in production consumption profits as in those countries we find very good performance with regards to the SDGs. Finally, we come in to say something about the long run discount rate and address the question of how do we take care of the long run benefits that climate policies will bring using a cost and discount rate. This actually translates any benefits that come into the far future, approximately equal to zero. We argue here based on a series of papers that we did that the correct discount rate, the long run discount rate. is a function of time, and it's a declining faction of time, and we propose an econometric methodology that allows us to estimate the time declining pathways of discount rate for each and every country we have data. Finally, we showcase an econometric analysis that makes the connection between ESG environmental social and governance performance and financial performance, and we find that a sound ESG performance produces and implies good financial performance, lower systemic rate, improved profit margin, and better returns and return to equity. I will stop here and ask my dear colleague and excellent scientists, Leonardo to come in and give us the results of the sections he contributed to this report. Thank you very much for your patience. Thank you. Thank you, Phoebe, my session is basically a policy session and a session discussing about the nexus between policy choice for ecological transition and finance. As we all know, there are at least six reasons why we should accelerate toward ecological transition and especially the reduction of emissions and the increase of the share of energy generated by renewables. There are climate reasons, there are health reasons, there are price, price volatility reasons as we know now for the gas crisis, strategic independence, and the fight against inflation. I would like to emphasize this as we all know, the price of energy started to rise again in summer 2020 after the end of the toughest part of the COVID restrictions. It has further increased during the after the beginning of the war between Russia and Ukraine, the Russian invasion, but there is also an important side of this inflation that we should take care, because if in ecological transition supply demand of the supply of fossil fuels falls more than the demand of fossil fuels, this is going to increase prices. So it is very important that ecological transition accelerate and is not just declared and not realized. It is very important that households and companies switch from fossil fuels to renewables, and this is going to affect also inflation and therefore well-being of people and their purchasing power, especially now. We need lots of investment to achieve our targets, our 2030 and 2050 targets of emissions. This is a very recent report and what we did in my chapter is to reason about some methodologies and some policies that can help us to achieve this goal. First of all, there are two dilemmas in this policy choice. One is about whether we should create incentive, exxample or exposo. So should we reward the reduction of emission or should we incentivize investment that declare that we will reach this goal? That's one choice. And the other important choice is whether we should adopt technological neutrality or not. So just focusing on the goal of emission without taking position on the technology and on the strategy. As we know, there are many technologies competing with each other now, hydrogen and even nuclear or carbon capture or whatever, not together with renewal. So there is a trade-off, of course, in this. And a main contribution of our work is what I call the do not significantly are consistent approach for selecting investment for incentive. So what is an ecological transition investment? And what we propose here, a bit differently from the approach of the green taxonomy, but consistent with it, that what matters for ecological transition is the dynamics of reduction of emission. So basically what we need to see when we decide whether an investment is adequate or not is to see what is the change in emission that it generates with respect to the counterfactual. And so basically our approach, which has been tested and experimented in Italy, is an approach that very simple and with very low cost also for companies, which shows exactly this point in each of the six DNSH domain, what is that investment to see whether it is consistent or not. And this is going to be applied in several directions on our opinion. I would say today we should need an inflation reduction plan also in the European Union as they are doing in the US. And it's very interesting that the plan of seven billion incentives for switching to renewables has been basically called inflation reduction. So the idea is that this is going to reduce this special, very special kind of inflation, which is basically an energy inflation. The other idea is the contrast for carboniference, which is specifically accept the exposed approach and the technologically neutral approach because it's going to reward actions that reduce the, achieve the goal of reducing emissions. An exact approach, which is consistent to what we say in the report, which Italy is actually following, is incentivating investment, reducing emission and increasing energy efficiency. An important focus of our work is about environmentally unfun strategies and here I would like to reconnect with what Professor Kunduri was saying that there is a loose connection sometimes between the environmental and the social goals. Now that the problem of just transition has to be really focused very well and here we have a problem. I often listen quite superficially by people who are not very much into the details that we should eliminate environmentally unfun subsidy. It's not that easy because these are money going to special very important categories or countries, agricultural workers, lawry drivers, taxi drivers, fishermen, and I mean, it's not easy in terms of social sustainability to just cancel these subsidies. So basically what we devise in the paper is a system which separates the substitution from the income effect. So basically the idea is that we can eliminate the subsidy eliminating the price, the wrong price incentive by providing an income compensation to these categories in order to avoid first of all social unrest, which would make this proposal unfeasible. And that's what up. That's why they are always there is environmentally unfun subsidies. Of course, now everything has to be suspended because basically what happened with the increase, with the strong increase of the gas price, it's the equivalent of the removal of the subsidies, but 10 times, 15 times more. So basically this is going to be done in normal times. The VNSH approach is as we suggest to be used also in the green bond emissions and we emphasize how green bond issues, government green bond issues are quite important also as a form of education for the government to understand which part of his public expenditure is consistent with ecological transition and it creates an incentive to increase that part because only that part can be admissible for the green bond issues. So when you talk with the investors, other suggestions for the future that we emphasize is increase the speed of ecological transition by putting renewable energies on all public buildings is something that governments can do soon. And we calculated in this way you can create a surplus that can be used even to subsidize families in energy poverty to support the carbon border adjustment mechanism, which is the only way by which we can export the ecological transition approach and be competitive in international trade with countries that cannot use our standard that can use below our standards. And the last point I would like to emphasize is there are also importance to develop a system of distributed bottom up production of energy. So the issues of energy communities and districts. There can be an interconnections between families, households and companies in this sense, which I think is very, very, very important for the future also for the stability of the system because producing and consuming instantaneously energy reduces the congestion of high tension system. Okay. Thanks. Thanks a lot. That's my point. Thank you very much, Leonardo. Very, very important to be able to bring in the economics and financial tools into all these discussions and identify incentive, compatible and cost efficient instruments that can help accelerate the process to moving to a sustainable pathway. And we economists have tried for many years to identify those instruments and they are quite helpful when they work and they work and they are quite disaster when they don't work. So it's really a privilege to be able to talk to you who has so much experience in this area of work. And I think what you suggest it could be a very efficient and helpful instruments. Next in our conversation, it will be in Kedan, Kedan Padel. I've introduced him before, but I'm going again. He's the CEO of Greater Pacific Capital and also the founder of Force for Wood, which is an incredible initiative. Trying to mobilize the ESG interest and the SDG interest in the business world and the banking and financial sector towards becoming efficient in supporting and facilitating the transition to sustainability and in supporting and facilitating the implementation of the SDGs and again trying to find incentive compatible ways to do that. Kedan, the floor is yours. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, people, and a pleasure to work with you and the team. And great to hear the results that are coming out of this report and how practical and implementable they are too. Let me put forward some of the work that we did as part of our research for Force for Good that contributed to this report. Let me share screen with you on on that too. So if I if I pick up some of the key conclusions of looking at the finance industry and what we what we did was. Kedan, sorry to interrupt. We don't see your slides. We just see your background. Okay. Now we do. Now we do. Thank you. So we looked at the change of major events in the world and how they impact the flow of capital. And clearly, our research in the report was looking at last year. We had found that there was a massive allocation to the SDGs. And finishing 2021 we would have concluded that capital kept being allocated to the SDGs but the SDG gap kept rising. But we finished COP26 with the view that the world, despite having fallen short on the targets really required to make a difference. There were substantial agreements on many things, including methane and deforestation, carbon and restrictions to some great extent on that too, but not quite getting to where we need to get to but still optimistic. The first six months of the year clearly shake that as we've just heard on things such as inflation and the supply chain and the security issues. With that data, we find that the security requirements are multi-dimensional. They include food and the economy and military. And if we add that up to 2030 with some projections, we find that you would need approximately $60 trillion to fund the multi-dimensional nature of security. Now, that's $60 trillion that potentially, if we were living in a more stable, peaceful, prosperous world would be directed towards the SDGs. So we take the SDGs and we update the data that we had last year. We find the following. And I will concentrate only on the headlines of this, that the cost of meeting the SDG goals overall has gone up something like 25% understandably because of the level of inflation in the world, which has been an underfunding of the SDGs for many years, and the time is getting squeezed in which we have to now deliver that. And so it leads to something like now a $176 trillion of spending requirement. And the gap has gone up about 35% from $100 trillion at last year's assessment to something like $135 trillion. And if I put that into context, the world has about $450 trillion US dollars worth of gross liquid assets from which they could fund that. These percentages are so big. And if you take the gap of $135 trillion and you add the security spend of $60, that's $200 trillion. What I'm actively saying is about half the money needs to go to the SDGs. Now, that's not really possible. And so we are set today to fail quite substantially in meeting the SDG goals by 2030, probably even longer than that. But what needs to happen to address that, and the report looks at that in some detail across so many of the sections. I'm going to summarize some of the work that we did on that to highlight how the stakeholder groups involved in the system of capitalism that we have today are moving towards the model that could fund potentially the SDGs. And as we point to a multi stakeholder consumer model of capitalism, and as Professor Konduri was saying earlier, you know, there is one aspect of this model which is unpriced, and it's nature. So it's, it's a free ingredient in most of the models, almost all the models actually that really underpin the system of capital. There's no money in who can make the biggest difference. Number one, households have the largest stock in some ways of capital to begin with they're the owners of approximately 60% just over 60% of the world's money. Governments have approximately just under 40% of the world's money. The finance industry manages this money on behalf of its clients and manages about 90% of the world's money. Governments have an enormous say, although their stock of capital doesn't compete with the others. You know, it's something like 60 trillion dollars out of 450. It has an enormous influence because of its spending and its capital plans and the direct investment flows that it, it makes across the world. So these are at least four stakeholder groups that would have to align for capital to flow. The finance industry, despite managing 90% of the world's capital, would argue that its, its clients need to allow it to allocate capital to projects with a different risk profile, with a different level of security therefore underlying it, and a different level of return profile with a short term, longer term that may be very different. And so there are at least four stakeholders that would need to collaborate to make a big difference. What we have noticed year on year, and we've been doing this study for approximately three years, looking at 450 data items of policies that cover ESG sustainability and stakeholder engagement. And we do that in the last study for 120 financial institutions, 30 of whom we have a qualitative engagement with to understand why they do what they do, what their intentions are, and how that might change over time. And what we notice is there is an enormous alignment around ESG policies and practices across these large financial institutions that you know the 120 represent nearly half the world's money. And they are committed to an ESG policy. What we have seen in the US though is some states and some interest groups believe that ESG is actually detrimental to their stakeholders. And they wish the finance industry to step away from ESG. And there has even been an announcement by one of the biggest allocators of capital to blacklist financial institutions that follow ESG policies. And that would seem completely contrary to the findings that we have from this study, which I'll point to in a moment, and against the interest of these stakeholder groups, at least in the medium to longer term, and potentially shorter to We find that the alignment between the largest institutions is very wide and quite deep, and it covers the most important topics that we would all look for, including climate change, carbon intensity by diversity, human rights, inclusion, risk management, ethical practices and so on. This is quite a deep allocation. About $30 trillion are estimated amongst this very big group to be aligned to ESG type practices and integrated into the AUM. But that's 30 million 30 trillion out of nearly 400 trillion. So we have a long way to go. You know this journey has really begun as opposed to you know we are at the peak of this journey. The allocation to sustainable development goals and sustainability more generally is quite widespread, and it has been growing and quite substantially over approximately a 10 year period. And we see that because it's profitable to do so. And so the profit motive has really mattered. What I want to keep reminding is that the profit that is calculated today has a free ingredient, which is profess can do or he said, is probably one of the most important ingredients in the profitability, and that's nature, the global comments. But the way it's measured today and reported today, and the way people are rewarded today would suggest that actually it's profitable to fund sustainability in the current model, and that that is growing as a percentage. We'll put this all into context, you know, it's one to 3% of the total $450 trillion that is truly sustainability financing. And I put that into further context to say that it is geographically very diverse in the sense that there are many parts of the world where this this capital is not being allocated. Not much of this capital flows to the global south, where the SDGs are focused. A lot of this capital is spent in the richer countries addressing the issues within those richer countries, or addressing climate issues of course which are global stakeholder engagement has become very important and the commitments have been acted on and, you know, over 90% of the institutions point to a commitment to stakeholder engagement from employees to local communities to the wider shareholder groups, customer suppliers and so on. So the system itself is embracing stakeholders. But again, this is also contentious. And it's begun in the US, where there is a lashback in terms of requiring perhaps institutions to invest and focus their capital to a narrower definition of fiduciary duty, which is focused only on shareholder returns in some way. And so there is a battle actually beginning and being fought out very gradually but we're in the early stages of that too. In terms of SDG allocation again there is an enormous inequality about where the money goes. And the money goes to issues that we would expect. It goes to climate, it goes to work, workplaces, but it does not go to the more difficult areas of extreme poverty, hunger, the oceans and so on. So there are big gaps in this allocation of capital. And it makes some sense if we look at it this way. The institutions feel they have a mandate to operate their capital in the physical locality and to the mandates they have agreed as part of their strategies. And so they allocate it in the countries where they have presence. Now that doesn't help us, you know, we really need that mandate to be changed. So it is a global mandate, but there is no precedent yet that is strong enough with institutions have done that. Now, if I come towards the end, it is enormously profitable we find consistent with the previous two reports to invest in sustainability. And that makes sense to us because those that are addressing the most complex issues are learning new skills, developing new capabilities and new circumstances. If you address these complex inclusion requirements, the s and the e, in particular, then you learn skills that require you to go into new places, address these problems, and do it profitably. And in doing that you develop a skill set which allows you to magnify your impact in the industry, and we just a superior organization to one that believes its main raison d'etre is just to process bits of paper that might be mortgage applications or loan applications or anything else, and to sell and distribute that product. And so there is a six x performance in shareholder returns amongst those doing the most, even if we are wrong by a factor which we don't believe we are a large factor, it is profitable to fund sustainability. I will only summarize this very busy last page to say the challenges that the gap is large and so large, the system itself would have to change. And that requires a multi stakeholder alignment around a plan where every stakeholder agrees to consume differently to produce money. And those two are big blocks that have not been tackled well enough. And, you know, more than half of the largest corporations have not yet embraced ESG or the SDGs or net zero. So we have a big shift still to manage before we can actually fund the SDGs. Thank you very much. It's really eye opening to have this holistic review of what is there in the business and financial sector, but also in public finance in order to help with the transition this unprecedented transition that we have to implement in a very short period of time in order to become resilient against the global crisis. It is really very helpful to cover reports such as yours in order to, to summarize and compile the different aspects of this of this effort, and to show that there is the potential for the change that we need to work hard in understanding how to implement this change. Thank you so much. Clearly, could I add one last point, which is it sometimes appears that it is easier to get funding to go to Mars than it is to actually address the issues on the planet of health and poverty for the poor. In no sense, it means the system is truly dangerous to the people that actually have the capital and are making the profits, not just those that don't have the capital. And so I have to believe that as we innovate more, and as technology addresses the cost of addressing these issues, and it becomes lower and lower over time. It has to become profitable to distribute product all over the planet, and to try financial inclusion, education inclusion, digital inclusion, and to see prosperity increase, because that cost is dropping very dramatically. And with my investment head on the most exciting opportunities I see, I see our technology driven financial solutions for mass inclusion, because it's you acquire new customers and you acquire them profitably now. And so we're open for education, and we see that too as an investor, and we see it across the board. Sorry, go on. No, I was just going to say, this idea that we cannot profitably fund education and finance and every other issue is actually a forced assumption, especially as technology continues to become cheaper and give us more access across the world. You know, we've launched six initiatives to do that from force for good. And I believe others will keep doing this and we will create new profitable mechanisms to address the world's issues. Yeah. I would say that they are already profitable in terms of the value they create the value that education creates, for example, is huge. If you simulate its contribution in the medium and long run to gross national product is huge. The big challenge is that this value sometimes goes unrecognized because it cannot be captured privately. We need the mechanism that allow this capture of the value of the benefits of all these to be connected this created value to be connected to public and private and public private partnerships. So that all of the investors, the different investors in an economy, I have an incentive, compatible urge to invest in, in education, and in decreasing inequality, and taking into account seriously the mass numbers that are they are making for this upgrade in their welfare in the social in the global south. So the potential is huge we just need to become clever in allowing the all kinds of investors to profit from public goods so that they have an incentive to come in and offer them. Of course, we need to be very careful about the rules and regulations of that, but it is important, as you say, to understand that most money they were there in private hands, and we need to let these private hands enter into the public good arena. Yes. Great. It's always so nice to talk to you, you get on because you bring this big picture into, you know, into an investment logic that makes it practical and creates hope for, you know, for involving the right stakeholders in this transformation. The next speaker is Miss Elenia Romani, PhD researcher at FIM, that will present us an analysis of the RFF of Italy, a very detailed database analysis of the Italian RFF. I'm really happy that you joined us. Thank you, Phoebe. Thank you everyone for giving FIM the opportunity to present its work in such an important platform. So, as Phoebe said, I will present this work titled besides promising economic growth with the national recovery and resilient plan of Italy also produce fewer emissions. You can find that the original work has been published online in the Journal of Economic Policy co-author together with Professor Galeotti and Professor Lanza by FIM. If we think of the challenges Europe has been addressing in these years, what comes to my mind is climate change on the one hand and the COVID pandemic so on the other. I start my presentation by briefly introducing the two main instruments linked to one another that the EU has put in place to address these challenges, the European Green Deal and the next generation EU. The European Green Deal is our action plan to achieve a sustainable EU economy and to address the decoupling challenge, hence by boosting economic growth while reducing emissions. And this is to be done by, they say, transforming the climate and environmental challenges into opportunities in all the economic sectors. And so this plan outlines the investments needed and the financing tools available with the goal of having a climate neutral EU by 2050. Related to the second challenge, the economic consequences of the pandemic crisis, the main instruments put in place by the EU is the next generation EU. Which is the largest stimulus package ever introduced in Europe. It allocates almost two billion euros to Italy only. And this presentation will be precisely about the impact of these funds, the National Recovery and Resilience Plan, NRRP, sorry. The plan is fully aligned with the European Green Deal. So we already see the interconnections between these two instruments. In fact, 37% of the plan's budget will be spent on fighting climate change. Also, it will follow the do no significant harm principle, and it has a specific mission, the number two, you can see it here devoted to Green Revolution and ecological transition explicitly, and it has the highest amount of money allocated and the highest amount of electricity for mission number two. But let's keep in mind that the primary objective of the recovery fund is, as the name says, to prompt the post pandemic economic recovery and reconstruction. At the same time, for the reasons I've just explained, the plan represents a crucial opportunity to make the EU economy more sustainable and greener. But is there a trade off between these two objectives so economic growth on the one hand and green transition on the other. So we asked ourselves what's the impact of the new EU funds for Italy on carbon emissions. And we tried to answer this question using the global economic model by Oxford economics doing a scenario analysis, focusing on both the economic and the environmental impacts of the Italian recovery plan. We are assessing the instrument with the cross models and cross countries validation we construct a number of scenarios and produce the relevant simulations. We start by generating two different baselines baseline a it projects macroeconomic variables forward from December 2019. We do not take into account the COVID crisis, while the other baseline it includes COVID as it starts from May 2021. The scenario with the COVID is decomposed into five different options you can see them here scenario be considers the pandemic crisis without the introduction of the recovery plan. The C considers only the investments of the plan while scenario D includes both investments and reforms. But what about the environmental dimension to simulate this we created a green connotation of the investment by increasing the generation of electricity from renewable resources. And this increment is determined by considering the component two of the mission number two, which is aimed at increasing the share of energy produced from renewable energy sources. The Italian plan explicitly specifies that with the measures funded by the plan. They intend to increase the expected generation from renewable resources, resulting in an increase of around 4000 gigawatt hour per year of sustainable energy generation. The scenarios that does obtain hands are obviously COVID scenarios with the plan green investments and so scenario E, and with the green investments and reforms so so we we work in this way in order to give, as I said that the green connotations to the funds of the Italian plan. So let's see the results that these research produced. And Elenia, please try to go as fast as possible because we have another five minutes less than and it will close the session as well. Okay, perfect. I briefly saw the results of these five scenarios on some variables of interest. Here we can see the GDP, and we see clearly a strong effect of the pandemic in the form of a drop in the GDP. The positive effects of the plan on GDP can be seen in scenarios C and E when compared to the scenario B in light blue and the finding is even stronger if we also include the effect of structural reforms. And from the economic point of view to the environmental one. Here we can see the impact on energy consumption from fossil sources. The impact of COVID is evident we see a big drop because the limited economic activity cause energy consumption to fall. After 2021 we see a mild recovery, obviously green investments so scenarios E and F determine a clear decrease in fossil fuel consumption while non green investments show an increase. So notice that reforms so scenarios D and F lead in any case in an increase in energy demand, because they have a positive effect on GDP but being just structural reforms so they don't include any specific reference to any possible green dimensions so actually their impact on fossil energy consumption is positive. So let's turn finally to the environmental impact the measure in terms of CO2 emissions. And what our simulation show is is that emission plummet in parallel with the drop in economic activity and economic and sorry energy consumption, following the pandemic and then they partially rebound when the economy recovers in the following year. So that means climate benefits only in the green version without these green investments the plan remains only a tool to boost production. Finally, I'd conclude with a look at the degree of the carbonization of the Italian economy by looking at carbon intensity which tells us how many emissions are generated per euro of GDP. It's the same at changing the energy mix in favor of less emissive evasive fossil fuels favor a reduction in carbon intensity. We clearly see the substantial drop of the index due due to the combined effect of the significant increase in GDP, and the observed reduction in emissions. The reduction is driven by the plan and obviously is most pronounced in the case of green investments. So wrapping up, we can conclude that the fight against climate change, the commitments made by Italy under the Paris agreements and the obligations arising from the you are already leading and even more will lead our authorities to important efforts to reduce emissions. We found that the green investments that are a substantial component of the plan will lead to a reduction of emissions, even if of very modest size, but we can speculate however that the reduction is likely to get stronger in 2030, since these are largely investments in clear technologies and the climate benefits are likely to be substantial over the longer time horizon. So that's all from my side. Thank you very much. Thank you very much Elena, very informative, very detailed and now I'm going straight to Theo Zahariadis professor at the Cyprus Institute to close this session. Thank you very much. The National Recovery and Resilience Plans in general. Thank you. Good morning. Good afternoon to everyone. That's a compliment to what Fifi briefly described but it's also a compliment to what Ketan showed about private investments. In our work and in the latest report of the senior working group on SDS and Europe, linking SDGs with the European Green Guild. We mapped these discrepancies between public budgets and SDG scores with a case study from the National Recovery and Resilience Plans. We did this with a case study from seven South Europe member states which already all together accounted for more than half of the actual grants that were provided from the so called recovery and resilience facility. First we did an analysis for Spain and Italy, this is included in the flagship European report Europe Sustainable Development Report, and then in our senior working groups report, we extended this analysis to seven countries. Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Greece, Italy, Slovenia and Spain, which as I said account for more than half of the grants that are made available by this EU fund. To do this, we studied each country's recovery plan in detail. And we tried to identify linkages with SDGs as regards the relevance of the public investments with the targets of the SDGs or the indicators that are used to compile the score of each SDG in the Europe Sustainable Development Report. And the graph that Vivi already showed, it shows the relevance of the recovery plans of the seven South EU countries to different SDGs. What this means is that mainly the recovery plans is already outlined by every speaker up to now, focus on digitization, clean energy, better infrastructure and some social aspects, but only some of them. There is less attention in public funds on more complex production and consumption systems that have to do with circular economy with food and nature. At the same time, however, these European countries face significant challenges in achieving progress towards SDGs exactly in these systems that are overlooked. And there is also less attention in public investments of the recovery funds on promoting behavioral change in the population. That's why, as Vivi mentioned in the beginning, the SDG related assessment of public and private investments can offer really a holistic frameworks that can provide an input to policy recommendations as it has both environmental and social aspects for the transition to sustainability. We have also provided a framework to mainstream SDGs in economic policy, combining exposed assessments of sustainability performance, such as the ones that are already available in the different dashboards of SDSN or EU or the OECD, with ex-ante assessment of public budgets, such as the ones that I presented and this included in our report. And this can lead to gaps towards SDG achievement, and this can lead to recommendations for public policy that can inform both public investments, decisions of public investments, but also it can inform public decisions on support to specific private investments in line with sustainable finance principles. Let me stop here and thank you very much. Thank you very much, Theo, for efficiently presenting all this very important work because it can really form the basis for budget allocations and that's why it is very useful. On this note, unfortunately, time is never enough. I would like to thank everybody who is contributing to the Sustainable Development Solutions Network. This is our 10th anniversary. And of course, our debate's gratitude goes to all the 1,600 institutional members that work towards the implementation of the SDGs. And of course, Jeff Sachs, his amazing leadership, his strength and power to mobilize all these people around the world. The hundreds of thousands of people that are involved in these 1,600 institutions that are SDSN members. Thank you all so much. Let's try to make this change.