 Welcome everybody to this webinar and we have called it the geopolitics of COVID-19 and climate change and we are so glad we have so many attendees to this webinar and my name is Eva Kruthmeyer. I'm a Swedish science communicator and moderator and now in front of your eyes I'm sort of transformed into a digital version of myself facilitating webinars and online meetings instead of real ones. The coronavirus changes everything for all of us. I've been working with the Mr. Adje politics research program for some years now and we've actually never had so many participants at any event before. So you're over 1,000 women and men out there all over the world who have actually registered for this webinar. I want each of you to feel warmly welcome and we all hope to be able to meet your expectations. So you can take the next slide there Ijan. The expectations today are around knowledge. The situation is serious and full of uncertainties. Today the 3rd of April 2020 and we are probably just in the beginning of this pandemic. People are dying in the world. In our research program Mr. Adje politics we use the tagline navigating towards a secure and sustainable future. What do we make of this under today's circumstances? Could this pandemic be the catalyst for societal transformation towards sustainability or will efforts to restore business as usual drive a new surge of carbon emissions, fear and international distrust? We see signs of generosity and protectionism going on at the same time. How can we understand this and how does the pandemic affect the climate negotiation processes and the 2030 agenda but also initiatives like the new European Green Deal and the Chinese Belt and Road initiatives. These are all examples of issues that we will discuss today. So some house rules on the next picture. I think it is. Yeah, there we are. So you as an attendee to this webinar are more than welcome to use this Q&A button. You see it there on the screen. It's a question mark in a little bubble. Please note your name and country or organization because it's nice for us to know who you are. Be short and clear is of course good always and we will try to answer also short and clear. I will encourage the panelists to do so and I also want to inform you that this webinar is being recorded and you can see it afterwards from our website. Please use the hashtag MrGPolitics and COVID-19 if you want to do some tweets or whatever doing this seminar. Okay, again let's look at the next slide please. Here we have the agenda for the webinar and I would like now every presentation. You see present presenter. You can see we have seven of them so it's quite a tight program here. I would like to turn to each one of you and I begin with Björn Ole Linnéir, our program director of MrGPolitics. Can you wave and say hello for us? Hello. On the mic, that's better, hello. That's better that you use the microphone, that's true. I mute and say hello. Great and then I turn to Dan Smith, the director of C3. Can we also have a hello from you? Yeah, hi. Can't be here. I think it lags a little so there you are. Now we can all see you. Wave Dan please. Yeah, I already wave twice but happy to. But you were not live then. So then we have Mattias Frumari. Are you with us, Mattias, on the phone? Yes, good morning everyone. Good morning, I'm so glad because we had some technical challenges just before but now we can hear you. I'm afraid I can't to join you in. Yes, good. Mattias Frumari from the Swedish foreign ministry. We are so glad that you're with us. Nick Mebe, director E3G, are you with us? Yeah, good morning. Good morning. Can we all, can we see you there also? Yeah, yeah. Let's see if you're in picture good. Wonderful, wonderful. And you are actually sitting in your house in outside London or where are you, Nick? In the hearse of Cote Ovid River in London. This is the situation we are all in now. So Eva Levbrand from Linköping University. Hello. You're in your home in Stockholm. Yes. Hello. Hello. Waving there, thank you very much. And Victor Galas, Stockholm Resilience Centre, Deputy Director. Good morning, everyone. Good morning. Can we see you there also in picture? Lovely. Last but not least, Åsa Persson, research director at SEI. Hello. Good morning, everyone. Good morning. Hello there. Hi. Lovely to see you. Then I would like to turn to Robert Wott, communications director at SEI. Are you with us, Rob? I am. You are, and you will help me with the Q&A session. I'm so glad and grateful for that. And you're actually on the little island of Öland, aren't you? That's right, Eva. Great to be with you. Thank you. Thank you for participating. So that was about it. And then we have Ian, our producer. Please wave, Ian. You are the hero. If this works, it's all thanks to you. So please, let's continue and start the presentations. What we will do now is that we will have five minutes for each presenter. And I will try to be as harsh as I can with my scissors cutting you after five minutes so that we can listen to all presenters first. And then we will moderate a Q&A session. So what you do then, once again, is that you text your question in the Q&A session there. We can't have you, unfortunately, in picture all of you, but we can see your questions when you post them. And we will try, of course, to ask as many as we can, also as many as we can. So, but now, are you all with us? So let's start with the first presentation then. And Björn Ola Linnéer, you are a professor in environmental change at the Center for Climate Science and Policy Research at Linköping University in Sweden. And you are also actually an associate research fellow at the Institute for Science, Innovation and Society at Oxford University. You are, of course, also the program director of the MISTRA Geopolitics program. So I leave the word now to you, Björn Ola. Thank you. As an introduction to today's webinar, I will shortly present the focus of this research program, MISTRA Geopolitics, and why we focus on the concepts of societal transformation and disruptions. So could I have the first slide, please? Or the other slide, actually. There we go. MISTRA Geopolitics focus on the dynamics of geopolitics and sustainable development in the intersection between national security, human security, environmental change, and global governance. Next slide, please. We do this in three areas, the geopolitics of decarbonization. Next slide, please. The geopolitics of decarbonization, food security, and sustainable oceans. So the COVID-19 virus seems poised to bring about economic and geopolitical disruptions and, ultimately, societal transformations that may well define our coming decades. In MISTRA Geopolitics, we focus on three transformative processes. Next slide, please. First, we have the great acceleration of environmental and socioeconomic changes, as illustrated by the graphs of Will Stefan and colleagues on the left-hand upper corner. Second, to address these global environmental changes, societal transformation towards sustainability is a growing political ambition around the world. Transforming our world is the headline of the 2030 agenda of the Sustainable Development Goals. Fundamental transformation in our societies are also necessary for achieving cleaner, healthier, and more resilient societies, by, for example, the European Commission's European Green Deal that was launched in the autumn and many other countries, cities, and companies around the world. Still, how sustainable transformations are made sense of it varies significantly across societies, something that we might return to in these discussions. I saw that from some of the early questions. Third, we see an ongoing technological-driven transformation driven by artificial intelligence, machine learning, nanotechnologies, gene editing, and so on. All these processes change the geopolitical landscape. So President Donald Trump and the Swedish activist Greta Thunberg represents two radically different answers to these changes that profoundly alters international and transnational politics, but also the geopolitical landscape of climate policy. Next slide, please. What is then implied by the concept of transformation? The butterfly's metamorphosis from Pupa through caterpillar to butterfly is a frequently used allegory for transformations. The concept of transition is often used to single change from one state to another, such as from an energy system based on carbon to one based on renewables. This does not necessarily involve profound changes of society, societal transformations, in contrast, sickness, profound, enduring, nonlinear systemic changes of how we organize our societies and live our lives. It involves social, cultural, technological, political, and ecological processes. Defined this way, the COVID-19 reduction in pollution is far from an inspiring transformative event societies are just put on pause. The transformative potential of deep enduring systems change lies rather in the perspective shifts that the crisis can trigger among us individuals and the enormous leverage that enormous economic recovery programs can provide. The ultimate goal of Mr Geopolitics is to enhance the foresight capacity in changing your political landscape. So in a major participatory scenario exercise with our stakeholders, we explore multiple scenarios of how the world might evolve over the next decades. We identified many dislocations with our stakeholders. The pandemic was identified as a wild card, but not presented as a major disruptor in our summary scenarios. It's against this background. We want to better understand the role of disruptive events for societal transformations. Next slide please. So are societal disruptions. It can be defined as occurrences that interrupt the system or process on continuing as usual for as expected. Is a Latin root means break apart. A disruptive can be a technology, a political event, an environmental disaster or a virus. Next slide please. Some see disruptive events as essential to enable societal transformations. Disruptions to trigger transformations typically involve all three spheres of transformations, the practical, the political, and personal. Others argue that disruptions could be actually working towards against the transformation, the revolutionary approach could make things go too fast. We lack the legitimacy of the sustainability transformations and so on. But in times of crisis, social structures and institutions are put to test. Normal practices and habits are called into question. Disruptions uproot and alter how we make sense of the world, how we behave, do business, do politics, learn, and go about our daily lives. Historically we can also see how disruptions can become defining moments. It can lead to frustration, polarization, and social unrest. But it can also prompt new perspectives, practices, cultural expressions, alter power relations, and other opportunities for production and consumption. Last slide please. Historian William Sewell has pointed how disruptions produce profound uncertainty, how we get on with life. He argues that, I quote, this uncertainty is a necessary condition for the kind of collective creativity that characterizes so many historical events. End of quote. The geopolitics in the aftermath of COVID-19 may well be defining historic moments for climate policy. It could be tipping the scales of the Paris Agreement. We may see a chance towards greater isolationism and a carbon intensive recovery. That's quite likely. But we could also see an international politics of generosity, a golden opportunity to turn recovery programs to green deals, but then instigate and navigate transformations towards greener, healthier, and more just resilient societies. So I look very much forward to today's discussion on what path COVID-19 will set us on. Thank you. Thank you so much, Björn Ola Linnéer, and I'm so sorry we can't hear the applause, but they are out there. Thank you very much. And here we see also all the partners of the geopolitics, Mr. Geopolitics program on the slide. I will now actually turn directly to our next speaker and we welcome Dan Smith, the director of CEPRI, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. He has a long record of research and publications on a wide range of issues, such as conflict and peace and relationship between climate change and insecurity, gender aspects of conflict and peace building, and global conflict trends. So we are very, very curious to hear your five minutes. Dan Smith, the floor is yours. Thank you very much. And I can see the live symbol beside my picture on the little screen, so I hope you can hear me. A real pleasure to be joining you all today. What I really want to do is to, I suppose, is to question some of what seems to me general thinking that actually Björn Ola was just expressing now, which is the hopeful possibility that we learn from the crisis response to COVID in a way that allows us to deal much more positively with climate change. And I'm not going to do that by outlining the alternative nightmare scenarios. But let me, but I want to look into the issues of knowledge and mindset in the world as it seems to us now to be changing. And I think it's probably a quite shared assessment or a shared impression that there can be game changes in the current COVID situation, game changes for international transport, game changes for the relationship between state and economy, game changes for how we think about our leaders, game changes perhaps for some political ideologies, both perhaps good and bad. And where I want to start is with what is thought to be one of the great slogans of the British stiff upper lip from the Second World War. So if you can move to the first of my slides, apart from this one, Ian, there you are, keep calm and carry on. It's one of the most famous slogans to come out of the Second World War. The interesting thing was that this poster was not actually disseminated by the British during the Second World War. And even more interestingly, what it was planned for was for use, if there were a German landing, if there were a German invasion of Britain, then the British people were going to be told to keep calm and carry on. Carry on with what? I'm not quite sure. But it seemed to me, that's when I was thinking about this, to be the kind of advice you give when it's a bit too late. And I think that too many leaders have shown the wrong kind of calm. It hasn't been an impressive display of resilience, has it, in our international political systems to see so many political leaders going into denial and then into certain kinds of disinformation. And I'm not only thinking about Donald Trump when I say that. So what we have displayed to ourselves is somewhat unresilient domestic and international societies. And far from keep calm and carry on, if you will show the next slide, which is the result of some witty people messing around with well-known slogans, and what we've had has been closer to now panic and freak out. And I think in some ways I would see these two slogans as trying to generalize approaches as potentially being the opposite sides of the same coin. So if you put up, if you now hit the animation switch, there you go. What we're looking for, I think, is something which is neither the fake calm of keep calm and carry on old chat, nor the throwing everything up in the air of now panic and freak out. So what in these circumstances should we be looking for in essence of resilience? Since I started looking at the relationship between climate change and insecurity, one of the things that has struck me most strongly is that in many ways resilience is fungible quality. But if you are as a community resilient to the impact of, say, a conflict in a neighboring area, then you are probably relatively speaking resilient to the impact of climate change or of a flood or of a change in the economic conditions or the influx of refugees. And why is this? What are the qualities which explain why resilience is fungible? I think that too. I think that one is the ability to handle information, to receive information even if it's unwelcome, to look it straight in the eye, to discuss it, to process it, to disseminate it, to draw conclusions and to act upon it. And the second thing I think the resilience societies of all kinds show is the capacity for cooperation. Now if with one eye, what we have seen is a non-resilient approach as far as information is concerned during the COVID crisis. With the other eye, part of what we've seen is the weakness around cooperation. We've seen a slamming of doors. We've seen the rise of blame the other kind of political sentiments, I see. We've seen the rise of a kind of nationalism. We've seen governments trying to resolve these situations by themselves. And this I think is where the geopolitics comes in. Because in today's toxic geopolitics, we see on the one hand with climate change, with cyber vulnerabilities and now with COVID, a rising need for international cooperation. At the same time, as we seem unfortunately to see a declining appetite for it and a declining respect for the norms that support and the laws that enable cooperation. And then I think it has to be said that that is looking at things at a governmental and political level. And we also see in social movements and indeed in parts of the private sector are far more encouraging signs of both being able to handle information, of wanting clarity and of being able to cooperate. So I think that somewhere, from some source, we need to derive a socially based challenge to the geopolitics that seem to be emerging at the moment. And then we will have a geopolitics or a political relations that are fit for purpose in a climate changing and to be seen well. Thank you very much. Thank you so much Dan, extremely interesting there. And I'm sure we will come back to many of the issues you discussed in the Q&A session. Thank you so much. Now I turn to Mathias and Mathias Rumeri. You're with us on the phone. I hope we can hear you. Yes. Yes, we can. You are actually talking to us from the Global Agenda Department at the Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs. And as a climate diplomat, it's very interesting for us to listen to your perspectives here. We've just heard that COP26 in Glasgow has been postponed. Please tell us more about the corona crisis and the effect on the ongoing negotiations. Please. Thanks very much. And such a privilege to be on this very distinguished panel. I'll just try to make basically three brief points and then we'll be looking forward to joining the discussion. I mean, I guess anyone who potentially doubted the impact of COVID-19 on climate action, I mean, as you mentioned, we just need to look at the decision to postpone COP26 taken earlier this week. I mean, we're obviously working out together with the EU partners and our UK partners to set a date for COP26 during 2021. Hopefully that will be set within a month or so. But I would assume that many would be also answering questions, sort of putting questions as to what happens now with the kind of ambition that we wanted to see during 2020. I mean, as long as 2020 was supposed to be the year of ambition where parties to the Paris Agreement were to hand in their new and revised nationally defended contributions or NDCs. Obviously, I think it's hard to say that we will be seeing delays in that process just because of the sort of the sheer massive crisis that many countries are facing right now. So how will we be able to mobilize that kind of action for climate at a time when economies are struggling and people are dying? So, I mean, of course, we will be doing everything we can from the Swedish side to make sure that we both from the Swedish and the EU perspective are doing our bit and also supporting other countries in as far as we can to keep momentum going and make sure that we're delivering on the kind of commitments which we've done in the Paris Agreement. So that will be my first point on keeping ambition alive throughout 2020 and beyond. My second point would be sort of also what earlier presenters have been alluding to also sort of the both the similarities and the differences between the two crises we're working on, certainly the massive impact of the corona crisis, but also the climate crisis and how we sort of what kind of lessons and we learn from climate action when it comes to sort of making, having lessons from the how we're dealing with the corona crisis. I mean, we've been speaking about the urgency of climate action for such a long time and so what can we learn from the massive mobilization we've seen in terms of resources and adjusting so quickly to this, the situation that we're right now in, you know, what kind of lessons can be drawn from that also when it comes to climate action, but also when it comes to charting our way after this crisis. And as I think we'll hear more about also the sort of how we are setting the recovery of the crisis in the context of implementing the SDGs and the Paris Agreement. How do we make sure that we are sort of delivering on those kind of commitments which are already there in Paris Agreement. And I think the UN Secretary General put it very nicely also to the leaders of the G20 just ahead of their summit last week on the importance of making sure that the recovery efforts from COVID-19 are sort of are building into our implementation of the SDGs and the Paris Agreement. And I would hope that we as Sweden and also also throughout Europe as a whole can build on the good examples that we already have. The Green Deal presented by the European Commission, the commitment by European Council in December for climate neutrality by 2030. Many of you would have read the Financial Times this morning saying that the Green Deal is now sort of puts on the backbone. I think all of us working with climate action would be doing our very best to make sure that that would not be the case but rather finding ways to sort of to link the way out of the crisis to the work ongoing on climate action. And my final point would be sort of picking up on one of your questions initially is sort of on the how does this crisis that we're in how could that serve as a catalyst for maybe new ways of working. And I think just looking at the climate negotiations and how we're you know when I started this job 18 months ago or something it was really struck me sort of the enormity of the negotiation process you know with 20 or maybe even 30,000 participants at each court and asking questions to colleagues do we seem to have these massive events in order to move the climate agenda forward. And I guess never before has it been people, indeed the English saying you know be careful what you wish for has maybe not been sort of come true in that sense that we now we're forced obviously to look into new ways of working but maybe we can also see that as the possibility to see you know how can we do things differently. We had a call in one of the committees done in Tripoli system we had a call yesterday to bring our work forward within the steering committee for the NDC partnership last week to bring that work forward. So I think we're already seeing how we're adjusting. So there are positive signs there Matias. I would think so yes I think maybe just to finish off from that to see how we can actually use those new working methods also to bring the climate agenda forward in different ways. Thank you very much Matias and we will come back to those questions and I will now directly turn to our next speaker and that is Nick maybe from the E3G think tank. E3G stands for third generation environmentalism and you are a founder director of this think tank. It's a non-profit European organization dedicated to accelerating the transition to sustainable development and I would like also to tell you that Nick is working very much on European climate and energy policies climate diplomacy foreign policy and he's also actually been working for the UK prime minister strategy unit leading working energy and climate change and also prior to that at the UK foreign office environment and policy department where you actually helped establishing the UK's I would say world leading environmental diplomacy network. Nick so we are so honored and happy that you are one of the presenters here today and I've promised you a couple of more minutes than the others just because you're a guest here so please go ahead the word is yours Nick. Okay thanks very much next slide please. So what I'm going to talk about is really complementary to the others which is really how the climate community is starting to respond and firstly I'm going to really apologize for a number of words on the slides you're about to see but that's because they are working documents from our internal and network discussions about what we're actually going to do as opposed to well-honed presentations so take this as a glimpse of thinking in action from the front line of trying to respond and these are discussions with both governments and non-governmental organizations I'm not going to read all the slides but kind of try and push some of the key messages and some of the ways our thinking is moving next slide. So I think really I'm not to add much more the main thing I would point out is that everybody's talking as if the main issue is the response the health response to COVID but we're already seeing second round impacts on debt in particular and economic growth particularly in emerging and developing countries and in oil exporting countries which could lead to a financial crisis which people are also responding to and the potential for third round impacts we're already seeing some countries restricting food exports and if you remember the food price oil price crisis in the late 2000s before the financial crisis again we can see social stability impacts so again it's a time of high uncertainty and this is not going to be the only wave of action going forward and as someone said the balance of cooperation versus isolation is still very unclear with US and China doing some rather silly public diplomacy on Twitter and food op-eds with each other. Next slide. But what does it mean for climate action? Pre-COVID we had very flat and oppositional geopolitics and we were looking for COP 26 and the conventional biodiversity to really create geopolitical momentum around cooperation and action we're completely changed now because COVID has created a huge geopolitical and geoeconomic wave which now climate change has to react to harness and engage with so we're moving from an agenda setting approach to fitting into our mainstream agenda. It means that COP 26 is less important in terms of driving overall action because the stimulus packages will do that in many ways but it's really vital to show the Paris regime and multilateralism is alive and working to drive cooperation. The whole economic response to COVID is going to set the context for next five years minimum in terms of this and it will interact with climate impacts so the climate will carry on changing to shape national and international social contracts and of course for the next 10 years we'll be living with the debt burden which has been racked up by COVID response packages so the economics of action will be influenced hugely and it's really unclear if there's going to be a big change that or if we'll see a pivot back to austerity politics and the third point is government action and therefore the politics of climate will become relatively more important because COVID is increasing the role and influence of the state in economic decision making. So next slide. So that means quite a fundamental change for climate politics and people trying to shift the political climate on climate change. Firstly we need to move from a momentum-based approach based around international events and high-profile people and announcements to really an interest-based approach so why should people constructing post-COVID recovery packages actually look at climate change issues? What's their interest? So it's a very different approach to winning the debates. We need to look at this geopolitics of cooperation and understand there's no neutral economic stimulus for the climate. This stimulus package over the next 18 months will either put us back or put us forward and that means climate actors need to get into such spaces perhaps they're less used to getting into in terms of mainstream political economic policy. It's a real challenge to us as influencers to move forward and there already is an attack on climate action as a luxury good and an inhibitor of growth and recovery and health spending both from ideological opponents and you know it's some in the development community and other sectors who have always seen climate as a thing far far away and not something immediate. So we need to look at complementary agendas with other sectors rather than competition that requires us to reach out to a broader set of actors and then there'll be debates over the relative role of state markets and we're already seeing people weaponizing plus injudicious tweets about the humans of the virus and let's look at the wonderful economic benefits of the crisis. Some of those tweets are invented by right-wing provocateurs to say this is what Greenies always wanted the destruction of the global economy. So what it means is climate action and activism needs to move to accelerate mainstreaming into core debates and being strong alliances with health, economic development, peace building and other sectors. So we needed to do this anyway but we would think it was a five-year process now it's going to be a year and a half process. So final slide. So we've wrapped that analysis into four kind of key challenges we think both governments and non-governmental actors who are pushing for climate action will need to face immediately and start organizing around. The first one which many have mentioned is the geopolitics of cooperation. How do we move beyond the initial narrative stage? We're saying lots of op-eds and movements about cooperation to turn that into practical geopolitics and make 2021 a super year for cooperation across all of the issues and especially because of the UK and Italy running the G7 and G20 and hopefully with the democratic president there's a real potential there to do that but it needs practical projects to move around it's not just writing good speeches. Secondly as the UN Secretary General said recovering better, how do we make sure the immediate stimulus packages don't invest in the wrong things and there's a lot of oil and gas companies trying to get their hands on public money but also looking at practical medium to long-term recovery. We had lots of good speeches in the last crisis about green stimulus but only 15% of the money was spent on green and part of that was because we didn't have the mechanisms to actually make things happen so this is not just again needs to go beyond analysis to what's the practical ways of making this happen. Thirdly we need to build a global resilience alliance which is bringing together health, food security, development, economic, peace building communities, inside and outside government to say we have built a very fragile and non-resilient international and national systems. We need to change the way we make immediate decisions and investments but also the longer-term regulation and governance and that's going to be the big battle of ideas next year. That's the one we have to win collectively if we're going to make sure we don't set ourselves up for more crises and the last one is really going to roll out a bit beyond that kind of winning the cultural war. What's this going to say about the balance between authoritarian and liberal states in terms of protecting their people? What's the cultural impact going to be on behavior? What's this going to impact on the social contract? I think that's going to roll out kind of deep, deep change over the next piece and to make sure that that's a pro-climate, pro-sustainability narrative is going to be vitally important. So I'll stop there but these are how we're trying to work with others to build and reprofoil all our work, practical work as politics and influencers in light of COVID. Thank you, thank you so much. Let's see if I can, thank you so much Nick and thank you for sharing your your work in progress here. Really wonderful and I turn directly to our next speaker although I would like to ask a lot of questions there but we'll keep the pace here. So Eva Lövbrand, it's our second speaker from Linköping University actually although I think you're based in Stockholm at the moment. Eva is a senior lecturer and in her research she explores how ideas, knowledge claims and expert practices are enacted, legitimated and used in global and environmental politics and governance of course. So today you have chosen the title, We Cannot Solve a Crisis Without Treating It as a Crisis. Tell us more about it Eva. Thank you very much, thanks for having me. So about a month ago when the coronavirus started to get a grip on the European continent, I was doing research on the Fridays for Future Movement reading through Goethe to embrace public speeches that now are nicely summarized in the Penguin book. No one is too small to make a difference, this one that you can also see on the slide I think here if we have the right slide up. Yes, very good. So throughout our public speeches, Goethe effectively insists that we cannot solve the climate crisis without treating it as a crisis so it's a direct quote from her, it's not my words. So to secure liveable and safe climates for generations to come, we must pull the emergency brake claims at Goethe and stop our excessive burning of fossil fuels. So what you see on this slide is an excerpt from a speech that Goethe held at an extinction rebellion meeting in London two months after she had initiated a school strike outside the Swedish parliament and so here is her quote. They keep on saying that climate change is an existential threat and the most important issue of all and yet they just carry on like before. There are no headlines, no emergency meetings, no breaking news, no one is acting as if we were in a crisis. Even most green politicians and climate scientists go on flying around the world eating meat and dairy. When reading through Goethe's speeches and doing research on them on the Fridays for Future Movement, it's clear that Goethe's message of climate urgency is informed by scientific calculations of the global carbon budget, which is the amount of carbon that we still can emit before global mean warming reaches a given temperature target and in this case they refer to the Paris Agreement's temperature target of 1.5 or 2 degrees warming. Now we know that the estimates of the remaining budget still are debated in scientific circles, but Goethe and the Fridays for Future Movement have made effective use of this budget metaphor to hold us adults to account for our inactions. So when measured against the carbon budget for 1.5 degree warming, most decarbonisation policies fall short. We already know that and here we're perhaps concerned to the next slide. So according to the online climate policy assessment climate action tracker, Morocco here in green is so far the only country with climate policy pledges that are stringent enough to keep us below 1.5 degree warming. A few countries in bright yellow have policies compatible with the two degree warming target, but most national pledges made to the Paris Agreement are so far highly insufficient. So if current policy ambitions are not radically increased, as was intended this year, we are heading towards a three degree global warming by 2100 with severe consequences for ecosystems, species, societies and people. There are the greatest crisis language and cry for help. So why is it that a virus outbreak manages to produce an emergency response that 30 years of climate negotiations have not? So how do we explain that governments now gain democratic support for authoritarian policies that severely restrict human mobility and freedoms but fail to do the same in view of what many climate scientists would argue is a much more profound and long-term climate crisis? I will not pretend that I have the full answers to these questions. I think we've already heard some suggestions here, but I think one important explanation of course is the time horizons of these events. In affluent parts of the world, the threat of the virus may seem much more immediate than the slow violence of dying glaciers, of species extinction, of water shortage, of degraded ecosystems, of agricultural lands. I also think that an immediate and a forceful response to the coronavirus holds the promise of a return to business as usual in the near future, whereas in effect the response to climate change threatens business as usual also in the long run. To keep global warming at the safe levels asked for by Gireta Thunbe and her young climate activists, we need to rapidly steer away from fossil fuel infrastructures and energy systems. We need to rethink the way our globalised economy works. We need to cut down on excessive consumption and travel, change the pace of social life, and I think perhaps most importantly learn to exercise climate solidarity, responsibility and care. So the time horizon and nature of these responses to these two crises are very different. Nonetheless I still think that the current corona event can offer an opportunity for social reflection and learning and we have already heard suggestions of that sort. It certainly invites reflection on our hyper-connected global economy. The current lack of medical equipment in many European hospitals makes visible how critically dependent societies have become on global supply chains and trade flows. The transnational spread of the virus also tells us something about human mobility in the 21st century and the acceleration of social life and connectivity, especially in privileged segments of society. So these socioeconomic interdependencies are signatures of a liberal democratic world order that has championed peaceful transnational relations through free trade, social mobility, strong multilateral institutions and I think it's this order that both the corona crisis in the short term and the climate crisis more long term call into question. So I think these crises invite us to consider how to best organise global life in the future and I look forward to talking more about that with you as we proceed. Thank you Eva. Let's see if we can move on. Thank you so much. Thank you for that one and for bringing Greta into the discussion also. We turn directly to our next speaker and this is Viktor Galas. He is the Deputy Director and Associate Professor at Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University and he's also the Programme Director at the Bayer Institute of Ecological Economics, one of the institutions of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Viktor has been very active on Twitter if you follow him those days and when debating corona and climate change one of my favourite quotes from Viktor goes, the corona crisis is a 100 meter race and the climate crisis is a marathon but we need to run both at the same time. So welcome Viktor. Thank you Eva. I hope you hear me okay. We do. Thanks to Mr Geopolitics for inviting me. I think this is a very very important discussion to have in very troubling times. As some of you know already I find it very difficult to see a silver lining in what we experience at the moment but of course it's our responsibility to help public and people to unpack what's happening. What I want to bring to the discussions I think are four concerns for trends or early warnings of where these events might take us into the near future and in the end try to get a little bit more into what can we do proactively to steer away from some of the worst impacts. So my first point is of course something that people have already touched upon in a very good way so both Dan and Matthias and Nick is that the time that the political and economic context for climate negotiations has just totally changed and not for the good to be to put it very, very briefly but you already said that the only thing that I wanted to bring to the table in addition that that also applies to the biodiversity issues and the convention for biological diversity that was moving into a post-2020 framework very important ramping up actions at the international level to address biodiversity and biodiversity loss and habitat loss is much more closely associated with pandemics such as these than climate and the term is emerging infectious diseases or or synosis so that's a concern so what's happening now is undermining our capacity to address not only the climate challenge but future pandemics. The other point for the next next animation please that I wanted to bring out is based on historical examples of financial crisis and how they impact on our living planet and the climate is that there tends to be domino effects and I think Nick already brought that up in terms of massive loans and for foreseeable depth that many countries will face especially in the global south historically we know that some of the effects will be an increase in extraction of natural resources so it's not just about the climate it's not only that the climate curve will move up again it's also that some countries will be forced to ramp up extraction of natural resources so we saw that for Malaysia after the Asian crisis in 1997 you saw rapid expansion of palm oil plantations with climate and biodiversity impacts I'm very concerned of what is likely or could happen in Brazil and the Amazon after this we need to be aware of that there might be needs or some countries will see the need to to boost mineral extraction or or seafood activities etc so it's the whole span of activities there are just there are beyond just the climate it's also our living planet so the third third point in the next animation please something that we've seen before for other pandemics or emerging infectious disease outbreaks with pandemic potential I'm talking about avian influenza and SARS for example there is something called secretization I'm not going to go into details of that it's a it's a big field but we know from from previous outbreaks what tends to happen is that we get these very very quick responses based on military force once you see pandemics as a security threat and in many regards it makes sense because you need to act quickly and the military and then security framing is what you have in hand but we also know based from from other pandemics that these approaches are very reactive they're very quick they're very drastic and and suddenly you have military marching on the streets you see that very clearly in latin america whatever that means for democratization processes etc another thing that tends to follow from this securitization framing is that it builds on a perception that diseases are something that evolve in the global south from poor conditions that we in the global north need to protect ourselves from at all costs and that that narrows down considerably what kind of policies you apply and i will give more examples of that so what happens in this case and we've saw that for avian influenza you see that for SARS is that you see investments in early warning and response infrastructures for one particular disease instead of of trying to cope with a multitude of disease risks especially those that that have big impacts on the most vulnerable so while we talk about coronavirus we are not talking about neglect neglected tropical diseases for example uh there is very little discussion maybe a little about black health impacts of black carbon in asia for for example so there's something about securitization that brings us down a path that is very reactive and that narrows down the sort of interventions that will take in the end and then my last point which might seem loosely connected to sustainability but i think it's important if i can get that last animation please has to do with with data and monitoring and surveillance so ian if you can put that animation on please so we're seeing in many parts of the world now concerns about the fact that the digital surveillance states or the emergence of the digital surveillance state which in some senses is logical with more data around how people are moving around in cities with cell phones etc you can use that data to track movement to make sure that people don't break quarantine rules etc and that that is happening now in south korea taiwan israel for example there are some news articles about muskow using facial recognition technologies to track people that shouldn't be out moving etc there are apps that you can download in the uk as i understand it that can help you track covid symptoms etc the question is all these innovations digital innovations are temporary but how do we make sure that they're temporary now do we make sure that they don't violate privacy etc so moving to the next slide in terms of how how we can think about this in a more creative way and try to avoid these sort of outcomes for the first first slide so what at this point we need to avoid a scenario where the climate community has a hammer and every problem is a nail to put it very bluntly i think the the needs to be a very serious and honest discussion about how we bring climate and biodiversity policy into the health domain and i've written one health there because one health is a framework where you think about animal and human health and the interactions of that so what are the policies that we need to advance in the next year that would have climate benefits that build on nature based solutions but that also reduce infectious disease risks in the future and especially the most vulnerable what is that i'm all for an energy transition i think it's great but how do we bring the one health perspective into what we're discussing now in the next cops both the climate and the cbd cop next point more animation please uh so the other thing is that we know from before that countries tend to boost their extraction on natural resources or natural capital after a financial crisis what are the policies that we can put in place in advance to make sure that that doesn't happen in a destructive way how do we make sure that countries don't boost deforestation rates just because they they need to pay up dex to cope with this massive pandemic for example well what's the role of the global community to help do that third point okay victor is that your last two very short okay thank you moving from pandemic preparedness to health a lot from all so for example when preparing for the next pandemic how do we make sure that the discussion is not just about tracking one disease and fears of having that hit hit the global north but how do we secure that those policies take a look at all health challenges that people face especially the most vulnerable and then the last point sorry for dragging over getting too excited about yeah uh in terms of privacy so this is a big discussion already now happening this big group of people developing things for ideas around responsible AI of course related to artificial intelligence that needs to be brought into discussions about this new surveillance technologies that we're seeing in the world thank you sorry for taking too much time thank you victor thank you so let's see if i'm in picture there thank you victor and uh now we have just one more presenter to go so please stay with us uh because soon we will start the q&a session but before that uh osa passion you are the research director at sei and you're the stock of environmental institute that is uh i would like to ask you now since you're the last speaker also i'm curious about what you bring with you uh from what you've heard here today we've been tapping a lot of interesting brains here this morning so how can sei contribute in in this context and what kind of research do you have and what more do you want to do in order to address those very challenging questions please uh thank you very much ikeba uh of course it's um challenging to be last in such an amazing um panel i think i expected we would hear lots of good things so i will just try to maybe amplify a few things i heard and add a little bit but try to be very brief and as Eva said maybe share something how we approach it from sei first of all i would say i mean just to point out that this we're still in extreme uncertainty we're about one month into something that could be an 18 month um a flow of events very unpredictable will we go back to business as usual will it be business as better or business as worse so uh at the sei thinking about this obviously we have received questions about what does this mean for climate emissions and so on i think this is wholly unsurprising and in fact uninteresting um basically the world economy has just pressed pause um what will happen to climate policy i would agree with matias there that it's still looking uh reasonably good um i think this um circumstances where and will indeed unleash a lot of innovation and creativity uh both within the negotiations half around the meetings but also from the climate movement uh outside of the negotiations putting pressure uh i'm quite interested to see how the sort of much higher level of public opinion around supporting uh climate action now compared with 10 years ago when we were heading into the last financial crisis if that will have an effect or if indeed also do the sort of um priorities among the public will shift as a result but i think possibly we're in a better place so uh what we're really concerned with uh at the sei is is like uh also many other speakers have pointed out uh the sort of impending economic crisis how can we ensure a global recovery that is sustainable and just and resilient um we have i think it's significant to point out that in the last 10 years we've had this long global economic boom uh in sweden it's been unprecedented along so and this is when we have made climate progress um so this is also an interesting thought experiment if we have not had covid would we still head into um an economic recession and how would that affect our climate action um so i think uh we need to um we would have perhaps needed to adapt anyway um uncertain geopolitics play into this global recovery strategy um i hope we will end up with the geopolitics of cooperation sort of that nick was outlining how that could look like but will it be geopolitics of isolation or geopolitics of conflict even um we have also started thinking about these third order impacts that that nick mentioned how will this affect trade flows not just of medical supplies but eventually food and other central goods how will it affect refugee camps migration flows um and also uh if we sort of expand from our quite Eurocentric perspective we have uh who will step in to support the global south in their recovery um 10 years ago this was led by the EU and US now China and Russia are more asserted will this lead to potentially higher carbon locking uh we don't know um so um we have started thinking about sustainable just and resilient recovery this is a mouthful and i can understand that if as a policymaker if you're faced with a 10 percent unemployment rate that these principles sound very expensive potentially so um fully agree there also with nick that's the key is to sort of make a sustainable recovery a green recovery sort of interest based and try to mainstream this into stimulus packages um one minute okay thanks um so um i will then just say a couple of points i do think uh this pandemic is sort of in a way productive for the agenda 2030 because it forces us to be a bit more focused i think it's a very sort of a good example of sustainable development showing that you can't you can't sort of achieve environmental gains through socially and economically unsustainable ways um and i was quite pleased to see that the UN Secretary General have connected a agenda 2030 and covid response in his recent report this week um i think there are interesting links between the pandemic response and climate mitigation climate adaptation general economic recovery when we look at the relationship between urban and rural areas uh but maybe i'll leave that as a cliffhanger for the q&a session so i will just end up saying that obviously i think this 10 percent unemployment rate if that's what we're looking at it will be a game changer for climate action of course it will compromise the fiscal muscle uh by governments but i'm also quite hopeful about this level of innovation the collective creativity that Pionola started talking about at the very start of the webinar and i do think we're in a better place to mainstream in sustainable development in these recovery packages thanks a lot thank you so much thank you thank you asa thank you for being a little bit of hopeful there at the end uh i would now now like to turn to all of you out there uh it's a always a drop out when you send live but we still have over 600 people watching us us right now which is wonderful so uh rob uh please can you um perhaps look at the questions there we have received already and there may be post one or two to the panelists so we can start the q&a session Rob are you there yes i'm here thanks very much Eva and hello to everybody who is joining us on this webinar um we've received a lot of questions um fantastic questions sharp um and i think they will stimulate a really interesting debate um some of the questions were directed to specific um panelists and i will come to those but i want to start off with some sort of quite broad questions that um i'd like to pose to all of the panelists and i'd like them to keep their answers extremely short so what i'm looking for is a sort of a yes no and a couple of sentences to justify your answer so um i'm going to start off with a question that's come in and i'm afraid i won't be able to say necessarily everybody's name and where you've come from um there were almost 50 questions that i've tried to go through um but i i did see that there's a question from Victoria Cumming who's from Bloomberg uh and she's asked and i'd like this to go to all the panelists um will there be a subs sustained reduction in greenhouse gas emissions we've seen that there has been a reduction will it be sustained keep those answers as short as you can uh with one or two sentences for justification and let's start um by going in reverse order so i'm going to start with osa please uh a sustained reduction my answer is no just look at historical data yeah well my answer is also no but i think not not because the emissions will go up immediately in the next coming years i'm quite sure of that but i think the stimulus packages will make a difference if we can turn them towards a more green deal type of of recoveries uh nick uh mentioned the 15 percent that went into green technologies and a green recovery in the last recovery period uh that more than 10 years ago and that was of course a very little part and we saw the emissions going up of the other 85 percent but those 15 percent made a difference in boasting the renewable energy technologies that we now see are taking up so so there is some hope in that and nick over to you um the reduction won't be sustained but i think we have now achieved peak emissions compared to 2019 and that will be sustained and that yeah i suppose my guess is as good as anybody's i would expect some of the areas of reduction that we've seen like transport to transport to stay down but others there's going to be a sharp boost i don't know how the arithmetic will work out thanks very much dan interesting there to begin to break this down into different sectors and industries that might or might not be contributing to an increase there um victor do you want to take over my answer would be no as well um essentially we're not we're not seeing a deep change in the structures that create emission reductions at the moment so my short answer would be no so there it's the the problem lies in the the system that the structures are not being addressed and therefore they're sort of in built the motor is is built to to to drive back forward ever yeah thank you well i i just shared the sentiment of the previous speakers that obviously putting society on hold um reduces emissions but as as we start to sort of accelerate again we will see emissions growing but perhaps our transportation patterns may change perhaps our willingness to travel across the globe will the appetite appetite for that will will decline for a little while but i i agree with others that we need to see more profound societal transformation in order to see the the emissions go down long term thanks uh and matias uh if you're still there um what's your perspective well i'd share the the assessment by by by the other panelists that the this current reduction will not be sustained but of course there is this opportunity to make to find new ways of of you know structurally within the economy and our society to to chart a way into uh meeting with those other parents agreement and the sg thanks thanks very much for those initial uh answers to the questions i think it opens up a whole series of follow-up questions um so i'm going to throw out a few of them here to the panel i mean i think that one of them would be uh are there examples of sort of virtuous examples of recovery policies um that allows to stay within planetary boundaries which are the sectors uh that might be targeted in that case um are there ways of combining an increase in employment uh with a sustained just and resilient recovery um so i throw that question out to the panel as well here can you get a little bit more dig in a little bit more which is specific examples we start with uh with bionola well yeah i need to think a while far to find really good examples but we can we see several successful recovery packages in in in europe or also restructuring packages so where we have the i'm struggling to remember now i read a report on the on the on the restructuring of some coal-based regions in in europe and like in spain maybe nick can talk about about the the examples from from the uk but where it's clear has been possible to face out the carb intensive industries and make the the regions at least but still competitive or turn to other productions and so on so there are several examples which now are used as as as uh inspirations or lessons learned for the for the just transitions policies that the european commissions now are are embarking on can i come in just a second can i ian thank you can i just come in with a follow-up question because i saw rob we had one from from the audience here also about the urban societies here what is going on there and perhaps you can give us examples of that in your answer and some sort of international alliances or platforms please someone is asking for here and where are the lacking we are sort of lacking to connect the dots in human nature interaction but where is this and how could we work with with this to find the synergies so that was just a follow-up so please rob go ahead yeah i think nick is um uh waiting to our next go ahead nick um just few yeah the the poster child of green recovery is south korea and they seem to be pulling it out again so hopefully they were 75 green last time so let's move that Chinese are already talking about investment in new infrastructure they've got a 40 trillion yuan recovery going in at the moment that's high speed rail 5g um electric vehicle charging building upgrades heating and cooling efficiency those are the areas you'll see um where to put the money sectors and employment um we're going to see some scrappage schemes hopefully moving into evs renewables will move forward um we may see lots of tree planting that's just short-term stuff but structural um there will be a lot of discussion about retrofitting especially social housing with energy efficiency but warning sign the u.s and australia did big retrofit programs last crisis done really badly and really shoddy workmanship and that caused a massive backlash so the critical thing we've got to look at is delivery of high quality infrastructure it's not just chucking money out the door it's actual delivery of stuff that works or we will just be picking up political problems downstream thanks very much um nick um victor your turn thank you i mean i i think we we shouldn't underestimate the importance of climate adaptation and resilience in this context it's not just about mitigation and transport systems energy systems it's also what what are some clever well-designed climate adaptation and resilience interventions that would help us prepare for next pandemic outbreak or climate shock i think one of the most clear win-win climate adaptation investments are in the health sector i think boosting health systems is a good way to deal with many many of the negative repercussions that we will see from from climate change and and and that's uh it should be a focus as well thanks victor um matias please go ahead thanks so much uh maybe not to go to go so much into specific sectors or sort of or or employment but just wanted to come back and highlight the i mean the the decision by the european council in december on green on climate neutrality by by 2050 in the EU and also the recent statement by the epicentering government from their meeting last week when they tasked the european commission to come up with a recovery plan which will be looking into both sort of the digital aspect and also taking very clearly the green transition uh so i mean it might not be that we need to be sort of looking for new kinds of solutions but rather look to the kind of the work which is all which was already ongoing before we uh entered into this present crisis so you know building on the green deal and just from the swedish perspective also building on what's already in there for example in fossil fuel fossil free sweden and the kind of initiatives we see in various sectors in in business on sort of making the transition to climate neutrality and of course the merging of that work with the kind of recovery packages to see uh emerging as well so maybe not so much or just looking to new solutions but building on what we already have thanks awesome i think you also wanted to come in on this point yes i just wanted to make two comments on these um virtuous examples or opportunities uh one is um i'm waiting for circular economic community to sort of come into this debate if we look at the unemployment numbers so far it's mainly in the retail sector restaurants hotels and so on i think there are opportunities there to sort of shift i mean make a structural shift going more to a service economy uh less of goods so that would be really exciting to to watch that space the other point that i alluded to before i think there's a really interesting kind of urban rural dimension to the pandemic and to climate action and so on uh i mean we know there's massive urbanization and also i think there's been certain hype around the agency of cities sort of leading the climate transition and so on to the demise of sometimes of rural areas have we forgotten about these rural areas there are many problems economic social um in rural areas both in the north and the south and i think this has sort of surfaced now as well with the pandemic um but in very different ways here in sweden urban people are advised not to travel to their country houses in the rural areas we heard from our colleagues in Nairobi that's i mean they also want to prevent this sort of people traveling from the urban to the rural but for but of course they do for very different reasons because they can't no longer secure their livelihoods in the urban areas um i also think the urban rural is featuring in the just transition discussions in terms of our rural areas kind of missing out on this the investment in low carbon solutions and so on and will they take a higher cost of the climate transitions with higher fuel taxes for example so maybe there is a kind of win-win opportunity to hear to think more about a sort of less highly urbanized society to look at the geographies of our societies both for a sort of pandemic preparedness but also to ensure that everyone is part of the climate transition we have a follow-up there Rob oh sorry i can finish there yeah okay you finished thanks thanks very much also let me pass pass the the microphone the metaphorical microphone over to Dan yes thanks my take on this is that there isn't actually a problem about maintaining employment while making either a transition or a transformation because everything that we're talking about is economic activity that will can will and should be involving people and it should be involving employment therefore so i i don't actually see an employment problem if the economy is rolling if it is moving forward if it is in recession that is a completely different matter now there is going to be a bounce back from the recession why because it always happens and the question however whatever the situation is looking like the question is what is the nature of that bounce back are we at the same time as we increase employment and at the same time let's imagine the the most wonderful possible green percentage of investment going in so we're greening the economies yes but are we also learning in a way that prepares us for future crises because however well we mitigate climate change i mean mitigate greenhouse gas emissions at the moment there is going to be impacts of climate change across the next 10 20 30 40 years and in some cases those impacts are going to be existential and in other cases anyway traumatic and catastrophic with lots of knock-on effects plus there's covid and that is a warning that there could be a future pandemic and so it's a question of doing all of this understanding that resilience is not just a product of the investment which is made it's in the economy it's a product of much else around that in culture in education in knowledge and understanding amongst basically everybody and not just in the business sector can i come in please go ahead Eva we have actually an interesting question coming into both Eva Löbrand and Nick Mibe here on on this issue also with with the behavioral change and what is what we see is actually happening now in society so what can the general public do or continue to do to help sustain and encourage others in society with a newly experienced ecological or social oriented lifestyle practices i would like first to turn to Eva and then to Nick so please Eva okay thank you very much interesting question for sure and of course the question that depends on the geography at where you're based i mean here we speak from Europe very much but i think from the everyday experience that i have now in view of this crisis that we're experiencing some sort of social slowdown i don't know if we de-acceleration is a word but certainly we're slowing down we're experiencing a slower pace of life and in view of climate change that might actually be quite an interesting experience there is suddenly time to sort of enjoy our family and neighborhood but also i think i recognize the importance of community social relations and and also in the in the more aggregate sort of a good welfare system a recognition of the importance of stable democratic institutions i think it sort of is an opportunity to reflect upon the importance of community in in terms of crisis and i hope we'll bring that with us as we proceed in in our efforts to tackle other crisis thank you thank you Eva and and over to Nick there yeah kind of three i think this is the most you're kind of profound piece but it's the piece of my thinking still evolving the three things that i would say is firstly i think we should all of the behavioural science marketing work that underpins so much campaigning and political thinking i think it's completely bust and this has shown it to be bust um because it basically the nudge unit has not been helpful in the uk which is you know some friends of mine from government actually but this is kind of the end of marginal marginal behaviour adjustment and talking much more seriously about humans response to big things so that's the first one you know it's a real opening because i hated that stuff secondly i think a lot of the behaviours will be sticky um i think japanese work office workers will commute less um there will be a reorganization of cities and in particular commuting habits and that's really good i how profound that will be i don't know but that's one of the areas i think it's really interesting i think the most profound piece will be the relationship between the individual and the state i think there's some really dark things there but some really positive pieces of that and about expectations of the state and state competence will rise um including in america but the most important statement i think which people missed internationally was boris johnson i don't often say this who said in his one of his broadcasts before he was put in isolation that there this crisis has shown there is such a thing as society which was him repudiating the legacy of margaret thatcher who kind of said there was no such thing as society just individual families and men and women doing what they want pursuing their interests so that i think marks the end of an era from the 80s which um politically which i think is very important rob please can you uh can you i think we can have one more question if you can aggregate a few of them and then over to your short summary please rob so i think i think a really important question is is the uh perspective of how to make sure the the camera how to make sure that the recovery is inclusive and addresses inequalities especially in the global south and if we can get as specific as trying to think about how what can be done to help countries especially emerging economies avoid sacrificing the environment for a quick path back to economic growth what are those because we've talked a lot about sort of things that might be more relevant to the global north how is this a matter of inequality and how do we address the the specific challenges for the global south so if i can throw that one out perhaps first of all to to victor well thanks i mean that's that's a difficult question i mean in the same way that we talk about a green new deal i think there needs to be a green new deal for the global south considering this and puts equity and and the i i believe nature-based solutions at the center and also keeping an eye on the international processes we haven't ready such as the time and initiations and by near civilian locations so a combination of redirecting capital to boost resilience uh and and keeping keeping momentum in these international processes but that's really just on the top of my head now i haven't thanks victor yeah it's a big a big question dan can you guide us through this a little well i'm not quite sure how far i can guide anybody through anything on these issues at the moment i think we're all looking at a a fog or you know if we're thinking about ships at stormy waters but a couple of things um first of all i think that there is a very close relationship between what we've been talking about in terms of international cooperation and geopolitics with the situation situations that different countries find themselves in in the global south first of all if you look at some of the flash points during 2019 when i think some of those flash points were more serious and coming closer to really major major war i'm not saying that they were making major war inevitable but they were coming closer to that point and we had experienced previously during the decade that has just ended what was different what was making things worse was the lack of international cooperation and when you look at the period from 1990 until about um 2007 2008 just on the eve of the financial crisis though i'm not saying there's necessarily a connection but you have during that period of the 1990s and the noughties a huge generation of diplomatic political activity the massive numbers of peace agreements being drafted and signed massive peace processes being set up an expansion of the global zone of peace that looked out from the perspective of the 1980s seemed like it was impossible in 2008 9 10 the downward trend in numbers of armed conflicts bottomed out and by the end of the decade of the teams we're back at the number of armed conflicts that there were in 1990 so there is a connection between international cooperation and peace there is a connection between toxic geopolitics and conflict now what we're talking about is how many issues many of them affecting what we think of in the broader security concept human security how many issues can only really be addressed if they are addressed cooperatively this is by the norms of cooperation and the laws the international laws for example like respect for treaties that support cooperation that's why they're so important so that's one thing that's a connection between global north and south thank you can can we just have a short comment from nick after this please yeah firstly i just want to reiterate what dan just said because i think that's incredibly important it's precisely why we need to win the geopolitics of cooperation well beyond the climate world i want to do three c's on this firstly commodities and particularly commodities um associated with deforestation this is one of the areas the uk was targeting as an amount to cot 26 and we'll still work on can we agree a set of bilateral a web of bilateral treaties which help countries um get demand for certified commodities that do not deforest and that would help this process there's a new piece of governance that uk wants to run secondly conditionality those of us who live through the structural adjustment programs we will have conditional debt bailouts what are those conditions going to be what let's make not leave the scars we left last time there's some of the conditions we ramping down coal power stations hopefully lots will be resilience and that's a real critical mass issue that debt bailouts and how we do that better this time and the last one is china will china play with the world or against the world a lot of the debt is chinese will it be inside the imf game or outside the imf will it be inside the commodities game or outside the commodities game that will determine whether this works or not thank you nick uh can i have the camera there ian and i would just like to uh okay thank you but we i would just like to to say that we are running out of time unfortunately and this those three c's from nick uh was was a beautiful uh summary in a way but i would like to turn very quickly to to rob i don't see the other presenters now if they're waving or not but we have one minute to go rob so if you can just give us a 30 second sort of rap and then uh we will turn to biannola for a thank you for uh or participating so please rob first yeah thanks very much eva um i i i think first of all i just want to recognize the fact that um we've had very active participation and a huge number of questions that we haven't managed to get to um that is by no means because we didn't value them and i think they're very interesting things that have come up uh to do with values digitization the economic system and we haven't managed to get to those apologies for that but um i want to recognize the the fantastic participation we had i'm not sure i can do a better job than nick and dan and others have done here but certainly things that i think are particularly significant are around how to make sure that the behavioral change that we're seeing is sticky um how to make sure that we are redirecting capital in a way that is consistent with 1.5 degrees the paris agreement but also crucially the 2030 agenda and addressing issues to with uh inequality and that brings in the point that nick made about conditionality of any uh stimulus and bailout um i think it was very interesting to hear the idea that the state has now moved into an interventionist phase and what does that mean uh for the longer term in terms of building crucially resilience as dan said resilience is a currency that has value in multiple settings and multiple crises and is something we should invest in and then finally perhaps this point about cooperation being utterly uh central to both building resilience making sure that we are prepared for future crises but also for taking forward the necessary collaborative agenda around climate action and before i sign off i think that uh i just want to press put put a little bit more emphasis on the key point that nick made around commodities related to deforestation if we don't address that then we really are undermining and making the climate action agenda far more difficult to address so this connects with what victor was saying around the quick win of of some countries wanting to uh essentially uh mine their resources in order to get to the recovery so that's a key area deforestation must be part of the recovery policy package thank you either and over to bianoula yes just quickly thank you so much it has been very interesting and we could go on and i hope for these conversations we'll continue there is lots to discuss and and think about and and ponder after this thank you so much my fellow panelists and all you who participated by listening but also the many questions that we got this has been overwhelming we're extremely happy for the for the engagement but a particular thank you then to rob eva and ian coldwell at sei who managed the technologies were actually were able to do this without any media flaws i think that was fantastic so thank you and can i just say a few words at the end here please the camera please so this webinar has come to an end uh we are so grateful for all the inputs from all of you over all over the world i i i don't i can't promise too much but we will make some kind of summary we will try to address some of your questions on our website and please stay in tuned with us on mrgpolitics.org and we will see too that some recording from this webinar is out there etc so from from my perspective the most important thing i take with me is that 2020 becomes the super cooperation year the super year of cooperation and i would like to thank all of you for participating today thank you all and please present to us stay just a minute i would like to follow up with you one thing thank you all