 Hello everyone and welcome to Tracking National Progress 2019 Europe Sustainable Development Report hosted by the Sustainable Development Solutions Network or STSN for short and the Institute for European Environmental Policy or IEP who are the co-authors of this report. My name is Cheyenne Maddox and I am the Outreach and Events Manager at STSN and I am delighted to be your moderator for today. For a little bit of background, the Europe Sustainable Development Report was launched in November 2019 and it's the first independent quantitative report on the progress of the European Union and its member states towards the Sustainable Development Goals or SDGs. This webinar will give us an opportunity to learn more about the report which includes the European SDG Index and Dashboards which is a tool that ranks countries on their progress towards achieving the SDGs. We will also discuss the impacts that COVID-19 and the SDGs have on one another and we will hear how to mainstream the SDGs in EU policy processes in the post-COVID-19 world. Before we get started I want to go over a few housekeeping items. To increase sound quality, no one of our participants today will be able to unmute their microphones. However, we very much encourage you to actively participate in the webinar and ask your questions in the chat box that you see to the right in your go-to webinar control panel. We will be collecting your questions for two Q&A sessions throughout the webinar so please send them as they come to mind. You will also find a few handouts in your control panel that include the report, a few other relevant documents, and a troubleshooting document so you will be experiencing any audio issues. My colleagues and I remain available throughout the entirety of the webinar to answer any questions you may have regarding the functionalities of the software. Feel free to drop us a line anytime. Before I pass it over to our first speaker, we want to get an idea of where everyone is from. I'm going to issue a quick poll and you should see this pop-up on your screen. We're going to give you about 30 seconds to select your answer. Everyone's very attentive this morning. Great job. Or this afternoon, I guess, in Europe. All right. Going to give you about five more seconds. Let's see. As expected, the majority of our attendees today are from Europe. But it's nice to see we have some representation from other parts of the globe. It might be a bit too late in the day for Australia. All right. Going to hide those results. All right. Now that we have a better idea of where everyone is from, I'd like to pass it over to my colleague Guillaume Laforteau, who is the SDG index manager at SDSN. Guillaume, if you want to turn your camera and microphone on. All right. The floor is yours. Thank you very much. And good morning. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Guillaume Laforteau, and I manage the production of the Sustainable Development Report. Within the SDSN, I'm an economist by training, and I will present today the results of the 2019 edition of the European Sustainable Development Report, but also share some early thoughts on COVID-19 and the SDG. So I will share now my screen and my slides. So in theory, you should all be able to see my screen and my slides. Cheyenne, can you confirm? Yes, it looks great. Fantastic. So just a quick word about the Sustainable Development Solutions Network. This is a global network launched in 2012. We operate under the auspices of the UN Secretary General, and we have three main priorities. We are a think tank, so we have research capacity and we provide SDG policy analysis and support. We're a global network of knowledge institutions with more than 1,200 members, and we're also a training center. We have an online education program called the SDG Academy. So today I'll start with sharing some thoughts on the COVID-19 and SDGs. These are a very few early thoughts on the situation. I have to say that these webinars were scheduled actually before the COVID-19 outbreak. This was a long-term set of webinars. We wanted to organize on our Sustainable Development Reports. Originally, the idea was to focus only on the 2019 results, but also to share early thoughts for the 2020 edition of this report, which will come out in November. But since we are now in the midst of a global health crisis, I added this first section related to COVID-19 and the SDGs. My colleagues from the IEP in the second phase will share more specific thoughts related to policies and regulations for the EU context. But before I start, I wanted also to do a little poll to just get a feel about the level of optimism in the room or in these webinars related to the impact that people anticipate that COVID-19 will have on the achievement of the SDGs by 2030. So as for the first poll, I will give you the opportunity to respond. There's four answer options, and I'll give you 30 seconds to answer this poll. Okay, I will give you five more seconds. Two, one, zero. So we have about 16% of people that believe it's too early to tell or have no opinion on the question, which was, in your view, what will be the impact of COVID-19 pandemic on the achievement of the SDGs? About 34% say that it will slow down. So very negative. 38 think it will have mixed impacts. 12% believe that it will accelerate progress on the SDGs. So this question, we actually asked it to the SDG community. So we pulled and we got responses from about 1,000 people. And I am glad to see that this room is a little bit more optimistic than what the SDG community shared with us. So the results of the 1,000 people survey that we did shows that there's a little bit less of people that said that it will accelerate the implementation of the goals about 10%. And a few more people say that it will be only negative about 36%. So I'll move back to the presentation. And actually, I'll show you the slides. So this is the results of our preliminary results of our polls. So you see here, we have about 10.2% that say that it will be very positive. And 36% that say that it will be really negative. So we have an optimistic, a slightly more optimistic group here today. So on COVID-19 first, I think here, I mean, this is something that we get asked a lot these days is what will be the impact of COVID-19 on the sustainable development goals. And I think it's very difficult to say at the moment and to quote the chief economist of the IMF when she gave the results of the April World Economic Outlook, uncertainty is clouding all the forecast. So I think there's still a lot of things we don't know right now. On the epidemiological side, the seasonality of the virus is unclear. The risk of a second, even third wave will depend also on the success of the confinement measures. The timeline for treatment and vaccine remains quite uncertain still. We still don't know how badly will African countries and Latin American countries be impacted. And there's obviously lots of questions and doubts around the accuracy of the data and the statistics at the moment. On the economic side, the feeling is that we're heading towards a long tail economic recovery. So it will not be a quick V-shape recovery. The big question is how quickly will domestic and international demand pick up? I think this is a very big question mark. As we are starting to decline, stores and shops and factories might restart, but we don't know if domestic demand will be there. And international demand might be disrupted for quite a long while due to disruption in the international supply chains. And then the economic stimulus, what will be the impact on microeconomics stability and inflation, these are also major questions. So on global output, I think a lot of you in the room have seen the predictions of the IMF for the world. So minus 3% in real GDP growth for 2020. The expect recovery in 2021. And this is much worse, at least for 2020, for the Euro area compared to other regions. The IMF expects recovery by 2021. But again, the chief economist said that uncertainty is really clouding the forecast. So predicting the impact of global output is challenging in itself. Predicting the impact on the SDGs is probably even more of a challenge. So what we've seen is a set of qualitative assessments that have been done. I think an example at the global level is what UNDESA has released earlier this month, which is basically doing a mapping of the impact that COVID-19 will likely have on the SDGs, including on gender equality, income inequalities, poverty, but also on some of the environmental and biodiversity goals. On our side in SDSN, we haven't released for now a thought piece on the issue. We will do so in our next global SDG index and dashboards, which will come out around mid-June this year. So we are working on a thought piece on COVID-19 and the SDGs under the leadership of the American economist Jeffrey Sacks. What we have done is to pull the SDG community on the issue. This was one question that was asked to the community. There were a few other questions related to which areas of the SDGs will be most impacted and how can the SDGs be a useful framework to inform the recovery and investment plans after the health and economic crisis. And then a point here, because this presentation here is about the SDG index and dashboards and the measures that we have to track implementation of the SDGs. Something that comes back to us quite a bit is whether we cover the issue of countries health preparedness for global health security, or whether we plan to integrate measures of countries preparedness to face epidemics in our next reports. And so here, what this graph shows and the analysis that we released, my colleague Finn and I last week, is to compare a measure that was launched in November 2019 called the Global Health Security Index with some of the data that we have on COVID-19. So we included an index which is a COVID-19 safety index and we also compared the results of the November, so pre-COVID index to mortality rates, incidence rates, but also to testing. And so the overall GHS showed that the US and the UK were the best prepared in theory to face an epidemic. And including on several of the, so overall in the ranking, but also on several of the pillars. And here what this graph shows here is that on the left, on the top left side, you have the ranking for the specific pillar related to detection and reporting. So you see that the US was ranked number one, South Korea number five, and Germany number 10. When we compare those pre-COVID results to actually the amount of tests per capita that were performed during COVID, so from March 1st to April 12th, actually the ranking would be the opposite. So Germany per capita tested much more of its population than the US and South Korea also tested much more. And what's interesting is to look at the gap in March. So the US gap in COVID-19 tests performed in March, where we see that it turned out that the US was much slower to start testing a large share of its population. And so this just illustrates the potential limits in the measures that are currently available to track countries preparedness, which would be covered possibly by SDG 3.D on the capacity and resilience of our systems. And so this is still, we're still looking and analyzing the existing measures. But our feeling is that in light of COVID-19, we might need to rethink a little bit about what are the best measures and indicators to track countries preparedness at the global level. So I put the link here. The analysis is available on our website. Moving on to the SDR 2019. So obviously the results are all pre-COVID and I'll share also a few thoughts on our next edition as a last slide. So this European Sustainable Development Report is part of a broader set of report that we are doing in the SDSN related to monitoring the Sustainable Development Goals. So we have global editions, but then we wanted to contextualize also a little bit more the monitoring of the SDGs, but also the narrative sections of the report to specific regions. So we've done reports for Africa, for the European Union. We also have a report for the Arab state region and we're going to launch very soon in addition for Latin America as well, obviously leveraging data from the region. So in the European edition, we relied extensively on data from the European Commission, including Eurostat, the European Environmental Agency, and all the fantastic work done by the European Commission, also by the Joint Research Centre as well, which we obviously cannot do for global editions. This European edition was a collaboration between the IEEP, the Institute for European Environmental Policy, the SDSN, and we worked also with the European Economic and Social Committee, and this was supported by the Finnish Presidency and the Enrich Bol Foundation. So continental edition, we also do subnational editions because obviously cities and municipalities are key for the implementation of the SDGs. Having one data point per country doesn't show the territorial inequalities within countries. So we also released many reports in collaboration, obviously, with our networks for the US, for Spain. I think some of the authors of the Italian city index are in this webinar, and we've also done editions for European cities and we're preparing other editions for countries in Latin America. So for this European index, we looked at... So we published a... So we published a overall ranking, which using a set of a bit more than 100 indicators which were discussed and where we consulted extensively on. And so we have a methodology to generate these results, which was audited by the European Commission Joint Research Center, and the methodology was also published in the nature, in the peer-reviewed journal Nature. So in our 2019 SDG index, Denmark, Sweden, and Finland topped the ranking. And the European Union average was equal to 70%, which means that the European Union is 70% on the way to achieving the SDGs. But more importantly, I mean, besides the overall ranking, which is obviously a lot for communication purposes, we also published a dashboard which really showed where we saw the main issues. So here the goals that came up as major challenges for Europe are SDG2, especially with the two sustainable agriculture and diets, including obesity. Then intra and inter inequalities, so inequalities within member states, so under SDG10, but also the convergence process, which is covered under SDG9, industry innovation and infrastructure, which is the goal where we saw the biggest spread in performance across member states. So very good performance from some member states and very poor performance from others. And then finally, SDG12 to 15 related to the climate and biodiversity crisis, here the performance is relatively poor, essentially across the board. We also present education of trends in the report. What we have done for this report is also to show a leave no one behind index. So this is taking only the measures which track inequalities within countries. So poverty and material deprivation, economy qualities, access to inequality of services, but also gender inequalities. And so what we looked at, for instance, on an indicator like life expectancy, we use life expectancy for the SDG index, but then we also use a measure of gap, for instance, by income, or gaps between rural versus urban. And so those gap measures, we put them into a single measure and we looked how equal our societies within Europe. So you can have a relatively good SDG index performance, but have specific issues related to inequality. So this is what this leave no one behind index does. We also showed in the report some of the trends by European subregions. So between Baltic States, Central and Eastern Europe, Northern Europe, Southern Europe, and Western Europe, where we see, for instance, that when it comes to the Palmer ratio, which is a measure of income inequalities, not all the subregions of Europe are making progress towards achieving a Palmer ratio of one, which is the objective or a target that the American economist Tim Glitz said would be a relevant target for countries to have. On negative international spillovers. So these are impacts generated by European countries to the rest of the world. So this is an aspect that we do cover in every reports in SDSN. So not only do we track the domestic implementation of the SDGs, but also transboundary impacts using different techniques. And here we see that this is an issue for most EU member states. And so here we disaggregated the types of spillovers in four categories, those related to economics and financials. So things related like tax havens, financial secrecy, profit shifting, using data from Oxfam, for instance, or the Tag Justice Network. We also look at social spillovers. So how much, how many fatal accidents at work can be attributed to European countries by importing from countries with poor labor standards. We also cover environmental spillovers generated through trade and consumption, as well as security types of spillovers. For instance, the trade in major conventional weapons. And so we took all these measures and we aggregated also a score for Europe here. And what we see is that if we compare to the Leave No One Behind Index, this one, the average for European Union is lower on this one. And we see a very significant issue on this, on this aspect. Related to those spillover measures, we have also released a platform which allows users to map where our countries generating these negative impacts. So these are mainly focused on indicators for environmental types of spillovers, derived from what we call multi-regional input output tables, which allow you to see through trade and consumption how much, for instance, in this example, Finland is impacting greenhouse gas emissions in other countries through trade. And this is connected to what Greta Tender calls the creative carbon accounting. So taking only account into account the production side and leaving aside impacts generated through consumption. So we have an integrated consumption-based accounting within our reports. And so we also track how much countries are generating impacts abroad, because obviously in their efforts to decarbonize domestically, countries should not outsource key sectors like cement and steel to other countries and then re-import the production. The SDGs being a global responsibility, this is no longer tolerable. And so we're able now to put numbers at the country level around this. We present very detailed results, including where we see missing data gaps. So this is the country profile for European Union. Everything is accessible online. And then our next ESDR edition. So we are partnering with essentially the same organization, so with the IEP, and we will work closely with European Commission services. We plan to release the report in November 2020. The narrative sections of the report will obviously focus on COVID-19, the SDGs, and the EU's recovery. Unfortunately, due to the timelines and data reporting, it is unlikely that we will be able in the quantitative sections to reflect the impact of COVID-19, but we will have a thought piece in the narrative sections. It will be co-designed with Civil Society. So we're planning to make extensive consultation between June and October, and workshops as well to mobilize Civil Society around this. The consortium, again, will be led by the IEP. We will work again with the European Economic and Social Committee. And if you are interested, and this is something of interest, please reach out to us, and we'll be very happy to share with you some of the requests for consultations and engagement processes and events that will be happening. I will stop here, and I will let my colleague Fin Woon, who is an analyst in the SDG index team, walk you through the data visualization tool that we have developed based on the European Sustainable Development Report. Fin, over to you. Hi, Fin. I think you need to unmute first. Thanks, Cheyenne. Hi, everyone. It's a pleasure to be in this webinar. My name is Fin Woon, and I work together with GEO, Met Sustainable Development Solutions Network. My specialties are data analysis and data visualization, and I'm going to show you today the data tool that we built for the European Sustainable Development Report and walk you through some of the features to help you get the most out of it. So let me start by sharing my screen. Cheyenne, can you see a blank screen? Yes, I can. Perfect. All right. So the first step to using our data tool is to actually find it. I saw that we already shared the link directly in the chat, so you should be able to see it there. But another way to find it is to actually go to our website, stgindex.org. And here you will be able to see all of our reports. And if you scroll down just a little bit, you will find the 2019 European Sustainable Development Report. And under exploded data, you'll be able to access it. There are a lot of different aspects to our data tool, such as country rankings, key messages from the report, some downloads, and additional materials. And we don't have time to go through all of them, because I can only show you three of the key features today. So I really encourage you to take a look at this after the webinar and explore the other sections as well. The first thing that I want to show you today has to do with this interactive map right here. What's visualized here is the overall performance of countries across all SDGs. So you can see here the Nordic countries are the ones in green best on the SDG index. And the countries in orange are the ones that are performing not as good. What you can actually do here is to get a really good overview of where European countries are facing some of the big challenges in Europe. By clicking one of these SDG buttons here, you can look at country performance for just that particular SDG. So let's say, for example, for SDG 13 on climate change, you'll be able to see exactly what Guillaume told us earlier. We see lots of orange and red meaning that countries are facing significant or major challenges on climate change. That's the first aspect I wanted to show you, which really helps you get a good overview at the European perspective. The second part I want to show you today has to do with a country-level perspective. So we call this a country profile. You can see here the country profile for Germany. And in the first section here, current assessment, you'll be able to see how Germany is doing for each of the SDGs. So you can see right away that Germany is doing better on SDGs 8 and 9 and struggling more on SDGs 12 and 14. We also have a trans-section which shows you how Germany is doing on the SDGs over time. The green arrow indicates that Germany is on a track to achieve the SDG by 2030 and the red arrow means that Germany actually progress is moving in the wrong direction. So the country profile is a really great way to get a quick-level overview of how a country is doing and what the key challenges are. And we have lots of people who actually take snapshots of this page to use in reports to give the audience a quick overview of the main challenges a country is facing. Now you can actually go more in depth than that. You can click on any of these goals to get more information. When you click on it this context menu on the right on the left hand side opens. It's a little bit small so you can use this handle to make it a little bit bigger. And you will get your bar chart of country performance. The best countries on the left hand side all the way to the right. You can see that Germany is sort of in the bottom third of performance on SDG 14. You will have a description. And then you can actually see the indicators that make up Germany's performance. And you can see that Germany is not doing so well on SDG 14 due to their poor performance on over exploited fish stocks and fish caught by trawling. You also have access to the leave no one behind index that Gio mentioned as well as the spillover index. And when you click on those you can actually see all of the indicators that make up this score. The third and last aspect of the data platform that I want to share with you today allows you to actually dive even deeper into the data. So this is useful if you really want to go to the indicator level to understand what's really happening at a specific indicator. If you scroll down a bit more on the country profile you have a section with indicators and here you can see all 113 indicators that make up the Europe Sustainable Development Report. And you can click on any of these indicators to get again additional context on the left hand side. So here we are looking at prevalence of obesity. These are the number the percentage of people of the adult population who are obese. And again you have a bar chart that shows you that Denmark is performing best on this indicator all the way to who is performing worst. And we are also able to show you a trend over time. So you can see that Germany was at 16% obesity in 2000 and has constantly been increasing over the last 16 years. So this is really great for diving even deeper into the data. You also have access to some of the metadata such as description the long-term objective, the goal and in many cases a source that you can click on and that takes you right to the actual database. So I'll stop here. I noticed was a lot and the best way actually to understand it and get a feel for it yourself is to use it. And of course we are available for questions in the upcoming Q&A session as well as afterwards by email. Great. Thanks Sven. Good segue. We do have a few questions so I'm going to go ahead and start with some of those. Guillaume, I think this one might be for you. Ian asks will the 2020 report include the UK in its coverage and are there any plans for a UK release index? Yeah, thank you. That's a great question. So we did include the UK last year. It was a tricky situation because Brexit was we were in the middle of Brexit so we included the UK we debated for a long while whether we would keep the UK in the overall EU population weighted average which we used to generate the EU country profiles and in the end we adopted kind of a mixed approach where we presented the results for the UK but we did an average of 37. For next edition we still want to include the UK not in the average of the EU obviously but as a separate country profile if data availability permits it and we also want to include as well some of the EFTA countries as well that's all a matter of data availability so hopefully we will have enough data from European Commission services to still be able to present comparable data and indicators for the UK and other European countries. Great, thanks. I'm on a UK city index UK city index not that I'm aware of not that I'm aware of but this is something we would be we would be very interested in doing in going more at the territorial dimension of SDG implementation but not that I'm aware of at the moment, no. Okay, great. I think this next question is for Fin Erevin asks what are the sources of data for the compilation and do you by any chance leverage any data from satellites at all? That's a great question. So there's a few different sources of data we have about two thirds of our data that comes from official statistics so this could be the World Health Organization for the European Sustainable Development Board actually loves data comes from Eurostat and then we have about a third of our data that comes from what we call inofficial sources so this could be data from researchers or non-profit organizations and some of the data we use is based on satellite data so for example when it comes to satellite data I believe CO2 emissions or when it comes to some of our spillover indicators these are based on satellite data but we don't do our own analysis of satellite data in any way so we use whatever researchers are working with or what the official agencies provide. Okay, great. Thanks for answering. Laura, ask and this might be for Guillaume Orphan how can we incorporate quantitatively the indicators needed for tracking COVID-19 if they are not included among the indicators of the agenda 2030? Yeah, this is a great question. I mean I think if you look at SDG 3.D and I don't have it right in front of me but I believe it speaks about countries resilience prevention and preparedness for dealing with global health security. So in theory it is at least partly covered within SDG 3.D but the reality is that up until now the focus that's a globally or even for Europe and this is the case for the SDG is the case for the work of a lot of organizations the focus was not so much on how to manage pandemics and on global health security. I mean we were speaking a lot of organizations we were speaking about the need to strengthen primary health care system ambulatory care and on the efficiency of health systems a little bit less on the question of resilience and preparedness but I think there is within the SDGs it is at least partly covered. Now what kind of measure do we have at the global level to kind of aggregate and summarize countries preparedness to face pandemics the main one we have which combines several dimension is this global health security index that was published a few months actually before Covid so the timing is amazing because it was published in November 2019 led by the John Hopkins University and actually the framework is very relevant in the current crisis because it does track countries ability to deal with zoonotic diseases the hospital care system capacity to do tests and reporting so it does capture all the right dimensions but when we compare these results with the US, UK and a few other countries that topped this index to actually what happened during Covid 19 it seems that the results are sometimes actually the opposite from what we see in reality and so that's why I think with Covid 19 we might want to rethink a little bit more about these indicators but another reason is that the global health security index cannot anticipate political actions and a lot of the response to an epidemic is also related to how quickly and decisive politicians are able to be in order to respond to these kinds of pandemics and this is outside of the scope of the global health security. So we have done some early analysis on this, we have published this on our website this is available and I'm happy to share also the link to this but I think this will really be a question as countries will start picking up the pieces and as we will start thinking about what more in terms of data and monitoring systems do we need rethinking a little bit the measures around global health security and countries preparedness will be a key issue. Right, yeah, lots to think about lots of issues around Covid 19 that no one expected and it'll be interesting to see how all that data fits together in next November. I think those are all of our questions now for the first Q&A so I think we're going to turn to our colleagues at IEP, Guillaume and Fen, you're welcome to turn off your cameras and microphones. Great. I'm now happy to welcome Svetlana Philopova and Eloise Bowden both from IEP as our next speakers can you make you the presenter Svetlana? Very much so. It's almost coming. Yes, we can see your slide so you're good to go. Right, excellent. Hello everyone I'm pleased to welcome you from my office kitchen on behalf of the Institute for European Environmental Policing which is a think tank existing for more than 20 years providing policy support to the European Commission and European Union bodies. I will be my name is Svetlana Philopova and I'm heading the Environmental Governance and Sustainable Development Stream Work in the organization and I'm going to share this presentation with my colleague Eloise Bowden I'm I'm going to briefly speak about the European Green Deal and the efforts on sustainability mainstreaming and then provide concrete examples of ongoing processes in streamlining SDGs in some of the European Union frameworks which is in this case the better regulation. My colleague will speak about mainstreaming SDGs and response to the COVID-19 recovery plan and then further will give examples of recent achievements in terms of SDGs integration in some of the economic policy frameworks in the European level namely the European semester. Since some 25 percent of our participants are coming from the EU I'll allow myself very brief background and situation points. The Green Deal is the new growth strategy of the European Union. Previously it was preceded by the European 2020 strategy which has made priority smart, sustainable and inclusive growth. Within this context the commission was striving to progress in terms of implementation of the sustainable development goals and has a concrete effort in terms of policy and legal development but also there was one reflection paper which discussed what are the possible alternative ways the commission and the European Union can approach the mainstreaming of SDGs and out of the options unfortunately it was not decided to have a one overarching European Union strategy on SDGs but rather an approach of alignment and mainstreaming and the current commission within the Green Deal it has included as an integral part of the strategy to implement the United Nations 2030 agenda and the sustainable development goals and indeed strives and commits to put sustainability and the well-being of citizens at the center of economic policy. Indeed in the COVID-19 reality it's becoming more prominent that concerted effort is placed on ensuring sustainability well-being and the citizens' health so the sustainability development goals we hope to be a framework which would lead the hopefully green recovery measures towards a sustainable investment in sustainable pathways. What the Green Deal is pledging I would just stop on a few elements which are of relevance is that all the strategies and processes should be designed in a way to achieve the European Green Deal and mainstream SDGs. There are discussions now on the introducing of sustainable proofing in order to screen the impact on the climate environment and social objectives. My colleague will speak more on the economic elements so I'm not going to touch those in my presentation but now the narrative about fair transition and EU resilience is becoming more and more important and Guillaume has mentioned early on responding to your questions that indeed the EU will be looking a lot more carefully into three elements health, well-being and resilience and we know which goals are including those elements now and they in a way would be becoming more and more horizontal similar I would say to the 16 and 17 goals which are rather cross cutting and are spreading out through a lot I mean all of the other goals so it looks like the discussion will be going in this direction and we're very much happy in this might be a way to increase the importance of sustainability mainstreaming and unfortunately we're losing a negative event but it might and will have a beneficial impact in terms of raising the profile then Guillaume also mentioned that it's of the most importance that we challenge the status quo and we check and monitor progress throughout regularly in terms of achieving the goals of the first stat report for instance I think one of the strengths of the European independent STG report is that it measures distance to targets and provides a lot of clarity in terms of what remains to be achieved in a way then returning back to the frame of the European Green Deal it relies a lot on digital transformation and digital technologies in attaining sustainable development goals so in my further talk I just here want to share a few reflections on the European STG report without at all claiming of being any more detailed but acknowledging that the report it does provide really good statistic overview over the last five years of development in terms of achieving the SDGs still there is room for improvement some indicators sometimes offering partial information and I'll give you just one example in terms of one of the indicators there is this indicator on grassland but flies index which is informative on the population of pollinators and their status and currently the report includes information on this index only from 12 member states so this is just one of the examples where the information is incomplete and partial there is a common opinion of the policy community that some of the indicators are still not sufficiently adequate and they don't really reflect well the European conditions and need to be adapted further to be more indicative and these kind of thoughts come in again in the context of the overall rethinking of European Union approach to sustainability and mainstreaming of SDGs so probably this is again a good moment to proceed in this regards another element I wanted to mention indeed about 37 exactly 37 indicators are the so called multi-purpose indicators they are used to monitor more than one goals but in this context we should always account the complexity of the SDGs and the interlinked nature of the different goals and further work needs to be focused on investigating synergies the trade-offs and the unintended consequences and later I will discuss some ideas how this can be approached and just to bring your attention and call you to check the European environment state and outlook report which was recently published it really provides additional relevant data which is alarming us on the urgency of change of approach towards sustainability then I wanted to talk with you about one framework the better regulation guide list and toolbox better regulation is a set of key principles which are guiding the European Commission in their assessment of all initiatives proposals and legislative assessments of the existing legislation it is assumed that better regulation as an instrument can become one of those coherent frameworks through which SDGs can be more consistently addressed in the policymaking process of the European Union the better regulation guidelines has been designed to include assessment of all the three elements economic social and environmental impact but there is a lot more one can do in terms of integration a systematic assessment of the methodological options for further integration of the SDGs in better regulation is definitely needed but I'll share with you some quick recommendations which can be already taken into account in the process currently the European Commission is reviewing the better regulation from the perspective of screening of the SDGs and the communication is expected to be launched by the end of May so it's very much now the right timing for this discussion and to make sure that concerns in terms of current better regulation and the possible ways of its improvement are shared as I mentioned the better regulation includes a set of 65 I think tools which are practical guidance on how the principles of better regulation can be implemented in the process and includes issues like how one can assess impact how one should perform an impact assessment or a fitness check exposed evaluation and then how one can run a stakeholder involvement campaign consultation so these are all different tools which are leading the commission in their work of ensuring better regulation and consistent compliance with the principles in the better regulation in all their policy initiatives and legislative developments what I wanted to mention that the better regulation is bit lacking a consistent assessment of a long lasting impact can be improved in terms of measurement of distance to targets as I also noted for the sake of the better regulation is one of the instruments that the European commission is working on again a horizontal view of how impact on health and well-being and resilience in response to crisis can be integrated in all the policy areas then cost benefit is still cost benefit analysis still in the core of the assessment and we are very much encouraging a combination in the introduction of more quality developments which will be also linked to quality of life, well-being and health and we have already good examples of the European semester and SDG mainstream income my colleague is going to touch upon those as I mentioned there are these three silos economic, social, environmental impact and the better regulation does not have a mechanism yet to ensure that the co-benefits between the economic and social for instance and environmental impacts are taken into account nor the trade-offs and what is really important here to be further analyzed in the case of trade-offs how one should prioritize what criteria are to be used to prioritize one or another measure and I'll give you a simple example the economic and social streams of assessment would be very much in favor of creating green jobs but then environmental concerns might come from the perspective of developing those green jobs in the environmental, in biodiversity vulnerable habitats and there will be immediately a trade-off that needs to be considered I can and as I said further work in designing and adapting the indicators is something that we are very much hoping that we'll be able to engage in along our work together with SDSN on the next iteration of the European SDG report and as I said indeed a total methodological review is needed in order to mainstream strategies in the European policy context and the number of strategic documents and policies which are being now or recently were published and I'll leave that to a later stage but for the sake of a start in terms of thinking on the SDG we're thinking that one can develop a basic scoreboard a kind of a quick analysis indicating to what extent the SDGs will be impacted by certain initiative or policy and these kind of scoreboard would be a quick way also to visualize the potential impact and you might know that each proposal from the commission is subject to stakeholder consultation from the beginning of its inception and this is called road map consultation where the commission is sharing the content and the objectives of a future policy that is being developed and this is the time when the stakeholders are invited to provide their first input we were thinking that if we share for instance together with the road map the basic scoreboard which assess to what extent the relevant SDGs will be affected this will be very important to get first feedback from stakeholders but also to decide on a degree of relevance and then design a proportionate analysis and invest in the scoping exercise which is actually the definition of impact and that have better outcome from the impact assessment phase again I'll call on further the further need of translating the SDG goals in the European context and this is very important for the exercise of mainstreaming of SDGs in all the other policies one needs to have a clear guidance I think that another horizontal element which is very important to be taken into account in terms of sustainability is the rights of future generation and the potential burden that we might be transferring to the further generation on the decisions and policy choices we are making today so we're hoping that the upcoming reviews will take into account also the intergenerational equity I'll stop here and transfer the talk to my colleague Louise who is going to talk to you about what did I do, I went backwards wait wait wait just a few notes on the stakeholder engagement there was a high level multi stakeholder platform on SDGs which mandate expired and it's not yet clear what will be the next forum at the level which will be coordinating SDGs integration but there were a lot of voices probably not clear mandate and not efficient enough outcomes of this multi stakeholder platform so it might be a completely different setup but what is important is that a structured consultation with stakeholders is including all the ongoing review the better regulation is having as I mentioned a stakeholder consultation process but what it was identified as missing is actually a structured consultation with the scientific community and the complexity of SDGs and their interrelation with the community and therefore we're thinking of suggesting a multidisciplinary advisory body whatever we call it committee which would be composed of scientific experts in serious society and we'll be having different members depending on the subject matters that are as a few concerns presently voiced by civil society and by policy community is that there should be more scientific evidence for better policymaking and more independent scientific input this would assist the assessment of expected various impact in their complexity as mentioned and will help to depart from the commission-led and old process now the better regulation is very much perceived as a commission-led process and then it might help also in terms of strengthening the impartiality of this process and improve accountability that I wanted to mention only on the stakeholder consultation although the process is quite clear and well structured there is one element that is raising concerns which is the lack of clarity of how input is actually considered in the policymaking process I'll stop here as I promised and I'll give floor to my colleague Louise I'll turn the slides upon your instruction thank you so now I will talk a bit more about the economic elements very quickly can you change slides okay so the European commission the European commission is about to publish a new budget adapted to the pandemic on the 6th of May and Ursula von der Leyen mentioned euros worth of investments so that's why we have to be careful on the nature of those investments and for that we can build on the lessons from the 2008 economic crisis in 2008 the EU green investments reached nearly 60% of the stimulus spending however most of the green measures failed to achieve a systemic change and most countries were left after the crisis with environmentally and socially harmful subsidies and inadequate regulatory regimes so what's needed for the forthcoming recovery plans is that they're designed to support a systemic change that is aligned with the SDGs they must cover all the key systems energy, mobility nutrition, housing and leisure we need to achieve a right balance between compensating the businesses and industries but also having a structural reorientation measures the recovery plans should also address major system lock-ins for instance dominant design or infrastructures and they need to strengthen economic, social social resilience to cope with the multiple shocks for instance climate change and finally we need to have innovation for transformative change policies that means that we need to ensure that horizon Europe but also the national research and investment funding are secured and that they're re-oriented towards system innovations that promote transformation pathways and allows for experimentations then secondly I'm stated under EU treaty stated is usually not permitted except under certain rules but with this new economic crisis the European commission is approving stated so right now more than ever we need to ensure that the rules of stated are aligned to SDGs and that they're not counterproductive next slide please so with some other thing thanks with IEP we came up with a five criteria for sustainability test and I'll go very quickly through the criteria to ensure that the recovery plan is sustainable the plan must be scientific must be scientific based needs to take into account resilience needs to look at equity and solidarity always prioritized the priority I support for vulnerable households, communities regions and countries it needs to call for transformative changes like I said before so we need to depart from carbon intensive sectors towards new sustainable practices and finally there needs to be scale so the fiscal stimulus package needs to be consequent which is going to be the case probably and next slide please now if we look at the economic tools that we have policy makers are facing dilemmas in the targets that they have if we look at it in terms of SDGs we have three blocks that are causing dilemmas SDG 1 which is fighting poverty SDG 8 and 9 which is economic growth, industry and infrastructure and the SDG 12 13, 15 and 16 which are about climate change and biodiversity loss three blocks are creating dilemmas for policy makers because they don't have the same needs so we need we need to find the right tool but there's no tools right now to help in the decision making however this pandemic is forcing us to look at those dilemmas and we think that the European semester which is the framework for the coordination of economic policies across the EU we think that this process could be a key instrument to operationalize the SDGs and implement the European Green Deal because it's the main holistic tool that we have available under the new European Commission and this year for the first time because of the promise of the president of the commission the European semester now aims at putting SDGs at the heart of its policy making so for the first time there was an annex this year with the country recommendation assessing the performance of member states towards SDGs and next slide please so we think that we could go further and with this pandemic the European semester should be assessing the quality of the recovery plans and adopting new approach for its recommendations and support the structural reforms so we think that should also look at other shocks not only the economic ones and make recommendations for instance on the adequacy of just transition plans or climate adoption plans well so I think that the semester should address systemic risk beyond the strictly economic and financial sphere so go beyond deficit rules and GDP rules but looked at a broader range we think that we should improve the sustainability scoreboard over time with new indicators for instance public funding for just transition and finally to have a long term planning and thinking the European semester could be complemented with what we would call a 2050 strategy for sustainable prosperity which would have a long term economic indicators but we also recommend having indicators of well-being, sustainability intergenerational equity upon which progress from member states would be assessed and that would be mainstreaming SDGs in the EU economic tools there, thank you very much and that's it for our presentation All right thank you so much Eloise unfortunately we are out of time but we have taken down all of your questions and we're going to send them to our speakers and we will post the answers in our write-up afterwards so I just want to give a big thank you to all of our speakers both at SDSN and IEEP we will have this webinar recording available on the SDSN YouTube channel and I encourage everyone to subscribe to the SDSN newsletter or follow us or IEEP on Twitter for updates on the next report as well as the next consultation our next webinar in the tracking national progress series will be next month and we'll look at the Arab region SDG index and dashboards so we hope to see you there in that one in a month but that's it for today so have a great rest of your day and stay safe