 Good morning, everyone. This is Milar speaking from the very heart of Turkey. It's a great pleasure to have you with us for today's Union Symposium, Geosciences and United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Pathways for the future. We are a group of early career scientists organizing this symposium and the idea was around since 2018 summer. We had the chance to do it this year under these circumstances, but nothing can stop us. So we hope that you will enjoy the presentations and the discussion in the final part. We have three featured speakers. Stefan Fritz, Juliane de Bada Sarre and Kansuke Fukushi. So the main idea was to have a platform where primarily early career scientists have a chance to discuss what's happening regarding the United Nations to 2030 agenda for sustainable development, which is covered by the 17 STGs, Sustainable Development Goals. And as geoscientists, we believe that the role of the science itself together with how this science is communicated or produced in the first place, which is designed is important. And today, through the talks, we would like you to have an impression of how the research is doing to address STGs. There are different aspects to it, but mainly we will have three main highlights. So you might want to ask questions, so you will have the chance to share your questions throughout the symposium through the questions and answers box. If you drop in your questions in the chat box, we might not able to see them, so please make sure that you drop them in the Q&A box. So just want to share my view on the STGs. So the planet Earth is thick, so to say, if you consider it like a living being, it has some health problems. And STGs are like the prescription that we have at the moment, led by the UN. And scientists are part of the recovery part and have a role to heal the planet for a long term. Okay, so now I would like to give the floor to our first speaker, Dr. Stephen Fritz from International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Ecosystem Services and Management Program, of which he is the Program Director. He's joining us from Austria, Luxembourg, and he's the leader of the Earth Observation and Citizen Science. He has been involved in many ERC H-2020 projects regarding citizen science, and today in his talk he's going to share his insights on how citizen science can help to address STGs, mainly through the monitoring reporting process. So thanks for your attention and now the floor is yours, Stephen. Thank you very much. I'm just going to get up, share my presentation with you. Getting into presentation mode. I guess you all can see my screen. I guess it's working. I would like to thank you very much for inviting me to give this talk to you. I've already described it very well. The planet is sick. We all agree on that. And it is the future generations who will suffer most. And just to get it now in the context of the current COVID crisis we are in, countries are going into big depths. And it's again the future generations who will have to pay that debt. So just to put it in the context of what's currently going on and why we are talking to each other remotely. This work has been also prepared and has been carried out partly by also a young scientist, early career, scientist, sorry, Delegh Freisel and a number of many other people who have been involved in this work. Just to get you bit into the context of where I see this kind of very interesting triangle. So in order to improve what's currently going on and to heal our planet as you have said, we need new policies. We need aggressive policies. We need policies that really target what's currently wrong with our planet. And this needs to be policies in the different fields. You can see it here, energy policies, land use policies, water policies. And in order to improve those policies and to give advice how these policies should be set up and designed. We need modeling tools. We need science which provides information and gives policy advice. But at the same time, we also need to understand if the policies actually working if the policy is doing the job it's supposed to do. For that we need very strong monitoring components and this monitoring is traditionally coming from the statistical offices. It's traditionally coming from some kind of sampling design, sensors, many other questionnaires, household surveys and so forth. But there is a new potential now with new technologies with big data and with citizen science to also contribute to monitoring these SDGs. So when you are sick and you are going to the doctor, the doctor measures your temperature. So this is just one symbolism which we can use that it's really important to understand where we are. Are we going into the right direction? Are we getting more sick or at least we're getting less sick? At least the planet getting less sick in the different areas. That's I think important. Just to move now, changing gears a bit here to the different ways of how SDGs can be monitored. As you can see here, as I have already described, we have the traditional data sources for SDG monitoring which are national statistical offices doing the job. But there is much more data out there. They are big commercial providers. As we know Google has a lot of data, has actually very interesting data which could be made more available, not just to people who pay for it, but potentially also to the UN. Donating data I think is a very important topic these days where people are also asked to donate, maybe in the future now starting from now. They are personal data where they have been and maybe if they have been in contact with people who have the coronavirus. Just as one example, donating data I think is a big thing in the future. We need to tap into more. And then we have many other very new innovative ways of collecting data. We have sensors. We have big sensor networks. People have variables around their pulse and around their arm wrists collecting data. We have many different passive sources. Also social media can monitor where we are going. And then sentiment analysis is a big topic. And we have the citizen generated data such as for example, humanitarian open street map data, but also open street map data as such. We have big database, spatial data infrastructures of different countries, open data also partly in some countries, e-governance and open data being a big topic. We have earth observation providing also more and more free and open data, especially the European Copernicus program now providing data on a 10 meter resolution every five days. For example, that is amazing. That really helps us a lot to better understand what's happening with our planet in terms of the environment in particular. We have the sustainable development goals and I think you are all familiar with them and I don't think I have to go more into detail here. I just want to pick some examples now. We have, of course, the traditional sources of data. So if we tap into these new data sources we get more information about where are the problems. So the statistical data just tells us where we are going in terms of direction in the different countries, but we are not understanding really where the problems are exactly in those countries. And that is I think very important. And citizen science also has a big contribution to be made in that which I will want to go into more detail in that respect, but just to flag a little bit the earth observation data so there are a lot of activities currently going on. And one very nice example is the water occurrence explorer that is run by the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission. You can see the logo also in this slide. And that is measuring directly SDG 6.6.1 which is how water bodies are developing now over time in the next years. They are disappearing if they are changing, if large reservoirs are established and what the impacts are of those. And as we know 6.6.1 is one of the indicators. So if water occurrence increases, that's in general more a good sign if it decreases. That's more a bad sign or not so good sign in general, but there are many nuances to this and we have to not forget those nuances. Another one is unlit building footprint. So earth observation has now really interesting means to map built up areas and you can now check is this built up area lit or is it not lit. If it's lit up that's quite a lot happening in the Western world in Europe in the US and many other countries. If it's lit up, it means that it has electricity. When the building is mapped by remote sensing was not lit. These are nighttime lights we are using for that. Then there are real issues and this can give you a very interesting poverty indicator. So whereas this is aggregated now on a national level, you can then zoom in in those countries which are currently red here where there is very little lit up buildings, especially in Africa, as you can see, you can zoom into those places and you can find out which current buildings are not lit. And there is an issue clearly there in particular with electricity supply. So this is another sustainable development goal to supply people with electricity, clean water, and many others. But of course, that is a big thing because in those places, people are still heating with charcoal, for example, and as we know, charcoal is creating a lot of air pollution and a lot of premature death, for example, are attributed to to heating and and with coal coal based charcoal, for example, as well. So just to bring you back to the interface between Earth observation and citizen science now. So, where citizen science also can contribute a lot to actually Earth observation is with respect to reference data in situ data so there are a lot of different learning algorithms now coming out, which managed to classify remotely sense based data but if you'd have enough training data, and not enough so called reference data then you cannot produce very good remotely sense based product so for that, you have a lot of data collected potentially on the ground and citizens can play a very big role in that, especially in the field of land cover land use related monitoring aspects. But our Institute also at the other have designed some of those tools, one being picture pile another one being foot quest go and that there is the Earth challenge and the Earth challenge network being currently extremely active so if you have a question on the Earth challenge network, just send me an email I will get you in touch with the, with the people and also with the websites you need to maybe you want to get yourself involved in that. We're also running there one specific theme, which is on food security where this is illustrated and reference data you can all classify in your room, you're not allowed to go out during COVID, you can do a lot of work at in your room classifying classifying street view or street level photography, which can be crops to collect more reference data to make better maps of crops, such as wheat and mace for example very important globally. Good wheat and mace maps are essential in order to understand better food security related issues and to provide early warning in those countries where there are droughts. Currently we have a drought in some places over Europe, interestingly. So in for that we need very good crop specific maps that we know ahead which crops might be affected. And this is even more important in developing countries, such as Malawi for example where most of the crops are actually mace stable crops in particular. Other activities, and I think I have to slowly come to an end that we have still room for questions where citizen science can also contribute a lot to monitoring of the SDGs is in the field of marine plastic coastal activities are going on and you can then follow a protocol which then can compare different amounts of plastic along the coast following a protocol that you can also compare countries how they are doing with respect to coastal plastic pollution but also a lot of plastic is of course in the sea and that also needs to be monitored that there are new devices which we need to decide design to be able to also quantify the marine leader as such floating inside the ocean but if you have a handle on the coast. You do count counts of those along the coast you can already get a little bit of understanding if it's increasing or decreasing and you have to do this regular. And there's a lot of very interesting citizen science activities going on in particular in New Zealand, for example, they have designed a very interesting protocol on how to do that. So there are also cop communities of practice with respect to citizen science and we are running a project currently European funded project called we observe you saw the logo at the beginning of the slide and that we observe project has so called communities of practice and in that community of practice. Delegh Fraser who was very active in that field is discussing different ways how citizen science can contribute to, to, to measure and monitor, but also to achieve the SDGs. So this is the activity ongoing and there's a lot of research which this group has also been undertaking. That's under review at the moment but I'll never also less show very few slides on that. This is the definition of citizen science. There is a lot of research around public participation voluntary contribution and in particularly knowledge production, and they're not going here into detail because there is not much time left and afraid. And what's coming out of this research is that citizen science is already contributing a lot to monitoring the SDGs, in particular, for example, around what open street map has been doing. For example, people living in areas within a two kilometer radius to current roads, which can be used the whole year. And that's a very important indicator because it shows how well people are actually connected to each other and, and can be accessing also global markets is a very important indicator also for development, for example. So that is very interesting when another interesting indicator is around biodiversity. There's lots of broad counts, a lot of biodiversity observations and species observation going on through, I naturally through eboard. And that's already contributing a lot to SDGs around biodiversity. For example, SDG 15 in particular, as you can see here, there are these green fields. A black box around it. This is are the SDGs where Earth observation and citizen science can contribute to that specific indicator. So indicators are a way of measuring progress towards SDGs and there are. I think now around 169 but they keep changing and being adopted. I think I will stop here that we have some some time for questions. Thank you very much. I stopped sharing I guess right. Yeah. Dear Stefan, thanks for sharing your insights. We had, we heard a lot about what's going on, indeed, regarding our observations with respect to how these observations help to monitor different indicators. There are many of them. So I think we haven't received a question yet, but just to make use of the remaining two minutes left, I would like to ask a question and I'm sure this is one many people are wondering. The citizen science has a great value, right? We acknowledge it, we see it, it's already contributing as you said, but what about the quality of the data? Yes, it's good because the data can be collected quickly and so much later, especially by the citizens, but when it comes to its quality, how can you make sure that the validity of these data can indeed be justified? Yeah, that's a very important question you're asking indeed. And that is the crux of citizen science data indeed. So there are certain ways how you can guarantee a certain level of quality. So one thing which citizen science is doing a lot is multiple observations. That's also what iNaturalist is doing. So it's not just one person is at least two people telling the same thing, so that increases the confidence. But there are also other ways like if people are not serious, you can find out about that. You can overlay data with other sources of data and then you know that this person is maybe not serious. And then another aspect is of course training and letting people really know what you are after and providing really good protocols and training programs on how to best do things and also making them understand what is done with the data. So this is the communication element. And then you can also do some automatic test tests of quality that these are I think currently the means used to make sure certain quality is guaranteed. But then of course you still have to fight against this general prejudice against citizen science that they will always say, you know, but still it's not good enough. It's not representative, so you can try to do something on representativeness of the sampling as well. You can sub select certain things and make it more statistically relevant. So these are the things you can do around the quality and around this criticism of not having enough quality. But thanks for this very important question. Yes. That's a good answer. And thanks for your presentation. If you have more stuff to say, we still have three minutes. We do have other questions if you want to answer shortly. Some people are some scientists here are asking how do you standardize data, especially from citizen sciences approach. That's another that's another good question. So one thing you can of course do it depends a lot on your citizen science project so it depends a lot on the purpose. So a lot of citizen science projects are indeed very local. What you can then try to do is to work with these local existing communities and make them aware about the need to standardize if they understand the need of to standardize. You can potentially at the second level, which is harmonized and standardized globally but you will have to work very closely with this existing local project. So that that is key and then you can of course try to do some standardization by understanding the semantics and the meaning of how the data is collected what it is and maybe sometimes it fits in some kind of standard approach but also what you can also do if you set up new projects. You can already follow this kind of standardized harmonized global protocol making sure from the beginning that it's standardized. These are different approaches you can take. And thank you very much and in this regard, another scientist is asking. As you know there have been so many criticism about the so many indicators that have been used for the SDGs. So how can geoscientists manage organize and collect data to be meaningful to the policy agenda for the SDGs. Yeah, it is a lot of indicators and you know it's it's so many indicators because the SDGs are trying to capture everything captures the economy and it captures the health of the planet together and that is extremely challenging. And that's why we have so many indicators. Of course, what we might try to do at some point is to think if there cannot be some simplified versions of these indicators, which are kind of summarizing them in one way or another. And maybe there needs to be more work done just to wait them differently because some indicators I would say might be less important than others might be that there can be a lot of discussion and it's very controversial but some kind of simplification process would maybe help in this process but on the other hand also I think a lot is also around awareness racing from the beginning and how if school children start to be familiar with all of this and with all the indicators. And educated from the beginning, I think it's much easier for people than to grasp the complexity of all these indicators. Don't know if this answers the question. Yeah, I think so either in some other scientists are asking how the social media can boost awareness or participation for citizen science and I think is is what you already said so we need to start increasing the interest on SDGs. The importance of collecting data and I mean, I mean, maybe just one more point into your early on career research. I think one thing which might be good to do is to we have so many SDGs but some of them they can be also simplified into the big global transformations we need. So there are certain big global transformations we need with respect to economy. For example, circular economy, shared economy, you know, things which are related very much to the economic power and the transformations we need. These are the questions we need to ask. And if we can orient ourselves along those transformations, we are also much more, we are better equipped to understand what we need to measure. Thank you. Thanks for the questions. I just would like to remind you that you need to drop in your questions in the Q&A box, not in the chat box. Okay. So thanks for your cooperation. Now it's time for the next presentation by Juliana Ribaldasere joining us from Uppsala, Sweden. He's a professor in the Department of Earth Sciences of Uppsala University. He's also a professor of hydrology and environmental analysis at CNDC, Center of Natural Hazards and Disasters Science. He has been very active in the field of hydrology, particularly social hydrology, and he is currently leading an ERC project on hydro-social extremes where he investigates the interactions between the society and hydrology. Without further delay, I would like to give the floor to Dr. Juliano. Thanks and thanks everyone for the invitation to this nice session about geoscience and sustainable development goals. I would like also to say good morning and hi to 300 plus people that are attending this session. It's very odd not to see you into your eyes, but it's nice to see such a large participation. So I will now move to the presentation by sharing my screen. And so as it was already introduced by the chairperson, I will be speaking about the way in which sociodrology can help address the global water crisis and meet the sustainable development goals. First of all, I would like to thank the many co-authors of this study that I'm going to present, which are mainly social scientists as well as hydrological scientists in many places around the world. Humanity is facing a global water crisis. This global water crisis is increasing its complexity, and it is often the result of a complex web of interactions between social, technical and hydrological factors. We carried out recently a survey across water scientists and experts at the AGU conference at that time was in New Orleans and the IHS conference, which is the International Association of Hydrological Sciences. And we have seen that in many places around the world we have ongoing water crisis which ranges from ecological degradation, increasing flood risk to groundwater depletion. And we asked experts to look into the main factors that are driving this crisis and what we can see on the right hand side of the slide is that these factors ranges from physical, technical and social aspects. And this is also why the International Association of Hydrological Sciences is launching a research decade called Panta Ray, which is focusing on the interactions between hydrology and society. There is nothing new about trying to understand the relationship between water and people. If we think that already 2500 years ago, Heraclitus, to express the concept that nothing is permanent except change is actually referring to the relationship between water and people. He said that no man ever steps in the same river twice for this not the same river and it's not the same man. And what we have nowadays we have hundreds of water scientists that are involved in many working groups in Panta Ray and I know that many of you are working on these groups and trying to better understand the way in which hydrology and society shape each other. So we see that in the Anthropocene, we can very, it's very difficult to find places which are not affected by the presence of humans. And in particular when it comes to hydrology or the special temporal distribution of water resources, we see that humans have heavily altered the hydrological regime. Such an alteration is both deliberate. This is one of the goals for instance in the building of water infrastructure or some risk reduction measures to mitigate floods or droughts can aim to change the hydrological regime or accidental. We have urbanization, deforestation, other types of land use changes that also have an influence on the hydrological regime. And while society shapes the hydrology, hydrology in its turn shapes society, humans respond to hydrological change in many different ways. It could be formally and for instance by implementing conservation measures. If we look into this slide, for instance, we have a diagram in which we can see how water consumption in the city of Cape Town in South Africa has been affected by a prolonged drought in the period of 2015-2017. And we can also see that different social groups have had a different impact, have been impact differently by occurrence of droughts. And also we have more informal type of response to hydrological change, we have migration, we have the emergence of conflicts or cooperation around water resources. And this is one of the main goals of Sociedrology, trying to understand how this mutual shaping between hydrology and society can generate phenomena, phenomena that characterize the water crisis and the way we can deal with that. Sociedrology is building on a long history of studying water and people. As I said before, this started already with Heraclitus 2500 years ago, if we look into modern science, the hydrology is building on water resources systems, integrated water resources management, social ecological systems as well as the study of a couple of human nature systems. And the reason why we want to understand this phenomena is that because they can prevent us addressing the global water crisis. There are some measures that we put in place that can have unintended effect, which are opposite to what we see. And in Sociedrology many phenomena have been described. We have supply demand cycles. For instance, we could have reservoirs that are put in place to cope with scarce water availability. But the presence of these reservoirs can also worsen water shortages as their presence may favor and enable increasing water demand until the next drought occurs and damages are even increased because we have more heavy dependence on water resources. We have rebound effects, which is the case in which more efficient irrigation may facilitate and encourage additional agricultural intensification and lead to even increasing water consumption. Another paradox is the safe development paradox or levy effect when increasing level of protections can stimulate urbanization of risky areas such as flood plains and increase the damage. Or maladaptation effect when the response to droughts may exacerbate the impact of floods or vice versa. So the idea in Sociedrology is trying to understand this phenomena. This is done through case studies in which we look into the different type of mechanism as well as models. But models not with the goal of making quantitative predictions, but rather to try to understand and display past changes of droughts and flood risk and explore future trade-off. So here in this slide we have an example of a model that was developed a few years ago by our research group in which we have been focusing on human flood interactions and the way in which flood risk changes over time. In our simple model, we made the fundamental assumption that flood memory is a primary mechanism, which can explain the emergence of certain phenomena, for instance the introducing structural protection measures that prevent frequent flooding can reduce flood memory and produce more incentives to urbanize flood plain areas and therefore put more people at risk. We see the role of memory, by the way, also in these days and we can discuss this later with the emergence of the corona crisis. A lot of attention is nowadays on the COVID-19. This has put many societies to prioritize the response to COVID-19 while maybe underestimating other sources of risk that we are facing in the meantime. In this type of model, I'm not going to give details, but the essence of this model is to try to understand how different responses can generate different trajectories of risk. For instance, in a classical experiment that was broadly discussed in the hydrological community, we compare to idealized or stylized type of system, a grid system which deals with floods, mainly by pre-settlement and a technical system which is building also some levees to protect flood prone areas. What we show is that in a grid system the flood memory is refreshed often and we also see the emergence of adaptation effect, in the sense that this continuous refreshment of flood memory makes people aware of flood risk and therefore take less risk and don't settle too much into flood plain areas or take other precautions. On the other side, the technical system is the advantage of preventing many flood events, allowing urbanization of the flood plain, but the cost is that when flood occurs, the damage is extremely big and catastrophic. The key question is not whether a grid system is better of a technical system or vice versa, the key question is about trade-off. This is kind of my keyword for today's talk. So the trade-off are very relevant when we look at sustainable development goals. Also before we were discussing about the fact that we have main indicators. Because with the sustainable development goals, the United Nations and many countries are mobilizing resources to look into the different factors related to our well-being. So we have social, economic and environmental factors. And many of these sustainable development goals are related to water resources, not only the number six, which is related to clean water and sanitation, but also many other sustainable development goals. Here we can see, for instance, in this diagram, some of the SDGs that are most associated with water, and since it is difficult to look into all those diagrams, I will focus on the way in which some of these SDGs can, the trade-off between these SDGs can be tackled only if we understand sociological phenomena. And since I made the sample of the safe development paradox and flood risk, I will focus on this phenomena and some SDGs. In particular, to sustain per capita economic growth, as well as the 11, which is to reduce that from water-related disasters, and then the 13, which is strengthening resilience to climate-related hazards. What we can see here is the trajectory of wealth over time, which is simulated by sociological models. We see the green line, which is a green system. You can see over the years, many, we have a growing wealth, which is interrupted by flood losses in time. These flood losses are very little. If we look into the technical system, which is the red line, we see that economic growth or the growth of wealth is much faster, but at the same time, when the flood occurs, which is more rare, but when it occurs, it has very big losses. So what these models can allow us is to explore the trade-off. For instance, this blue line, in which we have a trade-off between using structural and non-structural measures to deal with flood risk, and also to address the different sustainable development goals. For instance, in this case, a trade-off between economic growth and saving and reducing death from water-related hazards. For the sake of simplicity, I only showed two SDGs, but this can be applied to multiple SDGs. So the key goal to address the SDGs is to better understand the way in which our policies have an influence on water resources, including the unintended effect, especially when on the short and the long term. Here, this is why in our paper that I will present later, we introduced the concept of legacy risk, because what we do today will influence what we can actually do in the past. So as the past was a legacy to the present, the present is a legacy for the future. I will explain this by using a very simple diagram in which I make the assumption that we have two alternative policies. A policy, which I call short-term policy, that you can see in this diagram with a dark red line, and a long-term policy, which we can see in this diagram in something which is between blue and green. And then we can think about the performance in addressing the SDGs over time. So this performance could be the combination of different SDGs and how they are addressed by different policies. So if we were only focusing on 2030, we would go for the short-term policy. So trying to get as close as possible to our target by 2030. But what we can see with this example is that short-term policy can have very bad impacts on the long term. So maybe a long-term policy would be a most appropriate one. This is what these types of models can try to help, trying to make us look beyond short-term objectives. We see this also happening right now with the corona crisis. The big questions that many countries are facing, to what extent we can fight the virus without compromising the future of our country. And this is what we do on water resources as well. I make a more precise example in these two diagrams. In a short-term policy, which is here on the left-hand side, we see that we have that two type of indicators for the second CTI keep on focusing on the two of them. One is the real GDP per capita, and the second one is the extent of water-related ecosystems. We could have a policy which is increasing real GDP per capita, that we see that is increasing quite rapidly, but this goes at the expense of the ecosystem. So if we see the composite performance, which result by the combination of the two indicators, we have a growing up to a certain time, but then when the environment is degraded, we also have a declining GDP, and the system may collapse. On the other side, we have a long-term policy in which we have a more sustainable development in which GDP is growing not that fast, as in the other case, but the water-related ecosystems are protected. And this is the type of analysis that we can do when we understand the interactions between human society and water resources. The key goal is to try to avoid short-term fixes that can backfire in the long run. So this is the conclusion of my talk, which was very much about trying to understand and model the trade-off between different sustainable development goals with a focus on the ones that are water-related, since we are facing a very complex and multifaceted global water crisis. The importance of considering economic, social and environmental consequences, both the intended and the unintended, and trying to avoid short-term solutions that can have negative consequences in the long term. And the other aspect is also that sociodrology is aiming more and more towards understanding the uneven distribution of cost and benefit across different social groups. I leave with this last slide in which I advertise the paper in which you can read more about the way in which our understanding of human-water interactions can help us address the global water crisis. Thank you. Thanks Giuliano for this very excellent presentation covering a wide range of topics, which I hope made us all expand our thinking when it comes to water-related STGs, which is not only a few but many. As you mentioned, the global water crisis is ongoing and it's not going to be better soon, but we hope that the sociodrology research coming into the picture, we will see progress. There is a lot of questions regarding the first presentation, but for now I would like to give the floor to Julia to lead us, maybe one question we can get if there is any at the moment, but we will get them at the end of the talks. Julia? Yeah, thank you very much. There is one, but it's kind of a bit far from SDGs in your talk, so maybe I will address it later. So I have a question, very quick one. So as I understand, social-natural systems are quite dynamic, as you said. Do you think that the political committees, the politicians that have a very big turnover sometimes can keep track in their policies and how they can do long-term policies in light of their, you know, big change over time and how just scientists can follow because we are working at a different timescale, so policymakers, natural systems and scientists. Thanks Julia, this is a nice question and as you can imagine we can speak for hours about this topic since it's very key and I see that in the chat there are two, three questions about, you know, the fact that indeed we would like to have a long-term horizon, but politicians, national governments are often focusing on the short-term solution and the reason is that, well, there is a human reason, politicians wants to be re-elected at the next mandate. We have elections every four or five years, so hopefully there is a wishful thinking. They hope that maybe the big disaster will not occur during that period and therefore there is less investment on long-term policies, for instance, for the protection of the environment, to deal with climate change and also to tackle some prolonged water crisis. What we can do as scientists, there is a lot we can do. It was already mentioned before, it is important to raise awareness on this topic because at the end of the day the general public is convinced by the fact that we need to look, you know, we need this long-term perspective. Then I think that also politicians will be pushed to consider that more and more. So this is my brief answer to that, but of course it's very complex and there could be also other aspects. Education is indeed a key role to that. Thanks, Giuliano. We will get back to you in the discussion part with more interesting questions. Now we are moving to our last speaker, Dr. Kensuke Fukushi from the University of Tokyo, with an institute for future initiatives. He is also affiliated with the United Nations University as an academic program officer at the Institute for the Advanced Study of Sustainability. He is a civil and environmental engineer who is very motivated to promote sustainability science in various academic communities. And today he's going to talk about the role and value of water for the sustainable development of Asian cities. Dr. Kensuke. For me it's a good evening. I'm speaking from Tokyo, which is still locked down our next one month, unfortunately. So I'm delivering, you know, all kind of the lecture meeting from my room. It's like a YouTuber. I'm very happy to attend their EGU meeting, which is success-free held through this new technology. I congratulate everybody who can gather here in cyberspace. Today's my talk is one of several things that I'm talking things, but mainly I talk about an Asian case, which has a little bit different situation with other European and African cases. This is cities. The majority of their cities is going to be located in India, Asia for next century. 60% of the population is going to accumulate in Asia. And fortunately, unfortunately, most of our city is located in their coastal area. It's very natural. We are rice eaters. Rice in the past is a very very intensive agriculture, and they need to grow on the flat land. Flat land is on the coastal area. Of course, you know, there is a lot of round rock country like Nepal, but they're still and we have a major big cities in located in their flat earlier in the coastal city, which is generally in very vulnerable against the water. Since 60% of the population is in there in Asia and 70% of people out of 60% will be accumulated in the urban place. And of course, you know, one person in created what 40 gram of biochemical action demand that create the pollution. We need water, but we don't want to have a polluted water pollute polluted water does not have value or even negative value. flooding we have in the previous speaker we talked about flooding of course in a flooding is there never ending story. This is a South Asian situation, but in Japan we also still have a flooding different kind of flooding is coming in a very short time, and then destroy everything and leave in a very short time, but many Asian country is fighting with flooding. But at the same time, there is some city is still dealing with kind of frequent flood, but not much big disaster. However, the city is rapidly changing in order to prevent water engineer and from the engineering sense of view. But again, you know, they might experience the large disaster in their near future, because of their expectation or design of their that kind of their environmental infrastructure, sometimes they're below the real situation and their climate change situation. And of course, you know, this is Manila. It's vulnerable. I mean, they're our urban area have a not only just they're, you know, having a decent, you know, living situation, but many of them. And, and, and not small man of the land is occupied so called informal settlers. This is their, you know, I mean the informal sector we call no engineered house, which they built every every seven years, so they have they can adapt to climate change every seven years, however, you know, this height of their, you know, floor cannot extend, you know, there are some limit. Of course, it I'm joking this. You know, city or urban and water and people, you know, having a lot of their relationship is actually entire goals of sustainable development goals. And this is what I just pick up, you know, this is very common qualitative analysis that the things keyword that pick up come to my mind I just put throw it in the figure. However, it has a lot of the relation, but there's a lot of their opportunity and the world for people and as well as for investors, there's a lot of the chance for the investment from the in many sectors, in order to mitigate in order to supply water. I mean, very surprising that, you know, it's already several, you know, I mean this 96, which means there's four years has passed since last habitat, you know, being held in the keto. And I attended this and out of this habitat tree. We adopt the new urban agenda, which is right after one year after this is the adoption of the stages. And it has several places that emphasize related to water and that the transformative commitment of the equity and affordable access and adverse impact of the water has and sustainable use of water. And of course, you know, effective implementation of the in the urban area of the water, a promotion advocate investment on water, equip public water and sanitation utilities is a very important, of course, in the SDGs. In the center and in goal six, of course, in this goal three, goal 11. And as I shown in the previous slide, other all other goals is also related to the water earlier. The problem on water in developing urban cities in general, especially in Asian city water shortage by human activity, human as accumulated in the area of the urban area and one person in Tokyo we use 200 reader water per day. And for people in pro country utilizing between 15 and 100 reader water per day. And however, as course of the economical development, the amount of water they use is going to be larger. A shortage in urban water supply. We have in in Asia we have average of two meter of the prep station yearly. However, in urban area, because of the so many people living there in very small scale we get short of water. And also biodiversity and ecosystem services and damage water landscaping. This is also very important as things from the viewpoint of their high quality of living quality, living environment and water degradation by human activity. I say that we use 200 few hundred reader per person per day water, but this water is emitted from human activity with pollutant. So unable to use water polluted water is is no value or negative value somebody have to clean up that water. This is just church to the environment properly. And if you don't have a good amount of water and bad quality of water by the there's no biodiversity. Yeah, there's biodiversity of generic micro organisms, but we don't have you know I mean the original we lose. We lose original ecosystem, which was located there. All done landscape damage, of course, in addition to their damage of landscaping. This picture is very dirty water guess where is this. This is there in Tokyo 1970s, which is a 40. No, it's already 50 years ago. Time passes very quick. This is worse than jack out that this is worse than Hanoi. And most of the agency is better than this. Just 50 years ago. Our water environment is like this. I was 10 years old at that time. And population with water supply needs and switching in Tokyo. We have water supply to which total population is almost saturated almost 100% of the water supply and switch coverage and of course in our population is kind of almost flat. Now it's our water environment look like this. Of course, you know, from the viewpoint of landscaping. I don't know. I'm urban engineer, but I'm environmental. I'm not urban planners. But as a citizen, I don't really appreciate this kind of, you know, I mean there are landscaping, however, from the viewpoint of water quality. You can see fish is, I mean, there is swimming in this water. This water is relatively clean. If you think of the density of the people living here, it's amazingly clean. But we have to also know majority of the water body in the urban, urban liver in Tokyo is treated wastewater. Next, wastewater treatment in Tokyo was built in 1922, which is almost 100 years ago. We have 13 major wastewater treatment plant is almost all of them are activated sludge, which consume huge amount of energy in order to clean water. You can see the Yanagibashi Bridge 95.9% depending on season, of course, is a treated wastewater. In the case of the Jackalta, which is wastewater coverage is only 2%. This blue part is untreated wastewater, which has their like 400 milligram per read of their biochemical oxygen demand. That is their low dissolved oxygen in it. How energy demand technology application of such technology would exceed the planetary boundary from the viewpoint of the various things, energy resources. Our current society is based on their assumption that we have cheap fossil fuel, which is no longer apply. We have to change it. Currently, the most cheapest energy source is solar energy. This is one of our project result. This is a projection of urban flooding. In the future, we will have urban flooding if we do not implement the master plan of Jackalta. This is actually interesting. Many people project flooding in the future, but we also project urban water quality up to 2030 with a biochemical oxygen demand in various places. By the way, this is the river flow and here's ocean. This is high land and according to this figure, the lower part of this river having a higher, of course, you know, I mean the concentration BOD. This is if there is no wastewater treatment plan as we planned in the master plan. Of course, this future has a wonderful alternative of the future, which we can change if we work hard in order to maintain their quality better. This is a summary. Water pollution is going to be bad. Flood area is going to be worse. And with this combination in the flood, polluted water in the flood and we have more chance of having an interaction with wastewater, which has a high concentration pathogen. It is now we are also thinking in the coronavirus situation. You can access this website and you can download some of the map, not all. For we did 20, we did around 10 cities in Asia for flooding, flood damage, water quality and value of water, which is also we did an infection disease and local water treatment. So you can you can see and what kind of the work we did in the past. This is a new just I picked from the New York Times, which was in May 1st. New coronavirus is found in the feces. It's infected in the throat, but it's the growth in a small intestine. And in New York and in Paris, you know, so in the one, you know, we can article that that we can make wastewater as an indicator of their outbreak in the city. However, problem is that detection method is not established yet for coronavirus from wastewater. We don't know what the recovery rate of the coronavirus is. And something for always water is difficult. I have an informal meeting with their with their vice minister tomorrow in order to request to allow to sample from wastewater treatment plant in Tokyo. So wastewater treatment plant is now centralized and decentralized combination. We have now taken over in the past, we cannot make their treatment in the small scale, but now we can do it. So centralized and decentralized combination. Then if we treat a treatment in the decentralized manner, then we can recycle their water at that point. If we recycle water, we use a less small amount of water, smaller amount of water, and that's resulting the small amount of the wastewater discharge into the environment. And what environment, you know, optimize our quality of life and resident and tourist design landscape and other function utilize ground water for water resources and minimize health risk. Asian city. This is last slide of mine is a sustainable city with adequate and equitable, equitable and affordable access to the water and sanitation, even for informal settler. Resilient to CD for future climate and urbanization. We have in Asia we have a lot of too much of water in certain period of time, certain period of the season. However, it's very, ironically, we also have a shortage of water in urban area. Low carbon city through the integration of water management innovation and technology low carbon also means that we don't depending on their fossil fuel which is high intense, intensive energy intensive water, I mean their water treatment. Scientific knowledge is very important. This is our role of engineering scientist need for scientific based policymaking and urban planning. However, we also have to understand that we should know that science can describe only a part of the phenomena. We should not be so optimistic science can describe everything. Which is that fine. I mean there I also run future Earth in Japan. We have to have science and Practition and users in all kind of the stakeholder have to work together in order to fill the gap between science and reality. Thank you very much. Dr. Kensuke, thanks very much for your info for presentation. We had the chance to see some water dominant situation here about the water related situation from the perspective of Asians tease. So far, we are doing very well. With time. So we are well on time. I would like to now wrap up the presentations and then move to the discussion part afterwards but just before that I have a little a small question for you. How do you envision the future of cities where the nature is like the boss in the planning and the design of the city itself, like the society becoming hands in hands with the nature. So considering the high urban population and the limited resources. How would you optimize the future in which aspects. Thank you very difficult question to answer. I mean the most of Asian country is a tomb democratic, except I mean there for example, India is very democratic. That means their government is not be able to control and as in Bangladesh or Philippine activity of NGO is quite useful. The reason is government is not functioning. That means they're long, but at the same time, government is a, you know, having a political cycle of four or five years that we also is not really suitable for long term visioning. So I'm not really answering to question. However, I think their transparency and democratic way with their frequent discussion to plan long term is very important but this long term plan have to be redesigned every period like five years from the viewpoint of adaptation. I think adaptation from climate climate change is not really showing their alternative for the future but to think the system to reconsider to reevaluate the plan is important. From the viewpoint of that, you know, I think the staff and they know the citizen participatory are science is very interesting because government is functioning. And if you see the Hanoi water quality that river five years. There's a, you know, every day measurement because Cedar give a project. And after eight years, no measurement zero measurement. And then, you know, we need to give another project and then start measuring it. So this is citizen participatory is very good, because if we have this and if you stick some sensor, which, and then data is somewhere, you know, and still citizen may get there is huge opportunity for it company government even for this. So with this kind of open manner of their communication and student I mean that and and citizen also can change are by seeing this data can change that this proactive, you know, a pro environmental act, I mean their behavior, they can improve their behavior. So this kind of open transparent and democratic manner of the governance is very important. Right. Indeed. And there are many different cultural political diversity within the whole context. Okay, so I would like to thank you for your wonderful presentation. It was very insightful. And we will get back to you and the other two speakers during the discussion part. Before moving to bed, I would like to inform the participants where we are, we have exceeded 400 main reaching around 500. So this is excellent. And there's a great variety. So we have people joining us from across the globe. And one question coming from many of the participants is the availability of presentations. So at the session page, you can access the presentations. They are downloadable. And there are two of them are not there yet, but they will be so keep an eye on the session and the symposium page. Okay. So we had excellent talks from our invited speakers. I would like to thank them for joining us today and sharing their insights insights on the SDGs, UN SDGs agenda. I think we can move to the discussion part now. Our speakers have been answering some of the questions through the Q&A box, but we still have some unanswered ones. Before, I would like to say one more thing just to give a perspective based on the whole discussions we heard so far, and my own perspective included. So the earth is, let's consider it as a being like us. And we are learning how to live together with it and living inside as the societies where there is a great diversity in terms of political, economical, and many more contexts. It's really challenging to learn how to deal with these aspects while creating an environment where all the SDGs are met in a preferably a full extent. We have 10 years left and as the geoscientists coming together every year once a year within the roof of EGU, this symposium aimed to increase awareness on how we can contribute, how we are actually contributing and how we should continue further. And in this respect being the doctors of earth, trying to understand how it functions. And while this functioning continues how the society relates to this functioning and how we impact So, there is a great span of disciplines that involve the achievements of SDGs. And as geoscientists, we have a lot to do. Okay, and we hope that this session gave you the opportunity to think about how you can tailor your mindset, your projects, your research goals within the framework of SDGs. After 2030, we might, we will probably have a new framework. So this will not stop, it will continue. And we hope that as geoscientists we will do our best. Now on to the discussion part. I would like to pass the floor to Julia Roder. She's joining us from somewhere in Asia. Thank you. I have a question for Juliano, but I think he's going to be a very good even for Kensuke, because our guest is saying that we are in the need of long term perspective and solutions. So from a social science perspective, this can be modelled, but he is asking whether we can model also socio-economic trends to include even the economic part, as you Juliano were mentioning and also Kensuke that even the economic part is really much important and somehow difficult to predict. So how, if you can both briefly answer to this question. Yes. So very briefly is that, I mean, modelling the socio-economic part is nothing new. We have been doing this for decades and we are doing it. What is done more and more is to explicitly model also the way in which human behaviour and decision making process can change over time and have an influence on the long term. Clearly, since we have social processes involved, these models don't have a predictive power that you would expect for systems that are completely under control, but you can still use them to analyse plausible scenarios. And I also agree with Kensuke what he said before. I mean, when we think about long term, we think about long term perspective. So in my slide, for instance, I say that we have to be careful about short term decisions that can constrain our decision space in the future. So clearly we always need to adapt so decisions can be taken. But the problem is that there are some decisions that we can do today that will limit the decisions we can take tomorrow. So that's important to keep the space of possibility in the decision of decisions broad so that we can keep on adapting. Thank you. Yes, I projected the water quality of the 2030 but I have a big question mark on that because with water quality is really depending on the you know economy or population of the urban and urban population projection is usually is not really is good accuracy is not really good. However, you know, I mean they're now current project actually really is also part of it, you know, we model entire economy and reach sector. And what is their demand of water and what is their quality of wastewater and what is their demand of their water environment and then how much investment we have to put into the age sector for the world wastewater treatment. I think there are by modeling this economical system. We cannot make a long term projection. However, we can do like few years. You know, I mean, the future of the projection. And the methodology itself should be maintained. This is basically input out table in a based analysis. I mean, our role probably that we develop a tool methodology and result is subject to evaluate every couple of years. Thank you very much. I have another question for all of the panelists. The SDGs the one related to climate change shouldn't be just an indicator, but like a goal but should be like the first to be considered because climate change actually is like at the top of all the SDGs because everything is connected to that. What's your take on that if you have any any thought maybe we can start from Stefan. Yeah, I think this is a is actually a very good suggestion to some degree. I also said that at the beginning where maybe when I was asked about the indicator so the indicators are currently seen more equally but I think we should really look at the bigger transformations needed and the biggest transformation needed. I would really see you with respect to climate change so we need to prioritize and climate change is one of the I would say climate change besides inequality. This is one of the two most fundamental issues we have currently, and it relates also a little bit about on what you just currently said about the shorter term and the longer term decisions are being made so policy makers are making decisions not because they want to be reelected this is the biggest problem we have because what we are measuring we are measuring GDP mostly and that's what they are measured against because that relates to unemployment and as we know if GDP is high and well the economy is doing well. Unfortunately, Trump will be reelected now he has problems because of COVID. He would probably have most been likely been reelected now he has problems but we are measuring the wrong thing so we need to measure policy makers against other measures which are measures indicators which relate to the environment and we need to put climate change first and other things second and that is very very difficult and complicated process, but we need to start with the prioritization and with certain ways how we measure things so very good suggestions. Thank you, Giuliano. Yes. I think it is a good point to go to the essence of our perspective and indeed different people can think about different aspects and the, the, the many SDGs show that there has been a negotiation about different goals. For you, which is subjective, the key goal is to have a physical, mental and social well-being of any inhabitant of this planet. And this implies fighting poverty, inequalities and indeed the threat of climate change. And, and then we can discuss but I also agree with what Stefan said about we maybe also this COVID crisis can give us the opportunity to stop bothering too much about the GDP growth and think about, you know, our well-being in a holistic way so certainly, you know, well-being as the absence of a disease or absence of the virus as a physical, social and mental well-being. So that, that's for me is the driving goal. Indeed. Ken. Yes. I think I make a little bit different framing, you know, I mean their biggest change that we have to prepare against climate change is that we have to We have a very different source of energy now and we have to use it and that will make our, our entire producing system, social system, economical system totally we have to change it. I mean, they're in the past and we need a big kind of very high density energy source in order to make to run big with what treatment plant. We follow around 5% of the energy total energy demand of Japan. And, but we don't need that kind of high density water if we have a decent resume manner of their, you know, I mean the wastewater treatment. And we need a very small line one square meter solar panel in order to treat one household wastewater. And we just invested for this. I mean, they're in their Earth Day 22nd, you know, they're the Secretary General of the United Nations having a short video, highly recommended to watch it. And he said, we have to stop investing wrong place in their energy. And that is a huge opportunity for industry. So, government does not have power, people does not have power after even out of this corner in the outbreak. And we also have to depending on their work with their investors industry. And we have to make a win-win approach to make it. Thank you. Thank you very much. I have a question that may take some of the comments here. So when we speak about that we sustainability and development. We used to have a very broad perspective, but then if we look at single culture or seeding instead of rural communities or some continents we might face differences. We may also apply different measure, different indicators to measure the same approach or the same development. So some of the researcher also argue about some countries may have resources, some other have not, and may also use short term or long term solutions differently according to what they can do. Do you have any opinion or all these different cultural, economic and problems we have? Maybe I can start, but I guess this is a common question and at least I can speak mainly from a natural hazard perspective. Typically when we manage crisis or emergencies we always say that there is not one size fit all solution. I mean there are no universal solutions and everything is context specific. The type of measures that you can put in place depend on the social, cultural context as well as in the demographic conditions and various aspects. So absolutely what is being done with DSDGs I think is to open up a global discussion and there is a value in this because as I said before it is nice if as humanity we can agree on the general principles. Then how this then translate to each context it has to be discussed locally we cannot be decided top down from you know from from the UN to the to the local scale. Thank you Stefan do you have a clue on that? Yeah I agree very much with what has been said but the issue is clearly indeed around the indicators and what I'm seeing and what will happen is that you can measure these indicators in different ways and you know there are certain indicators like for example forest area right. We are sometimes in some countries oil palm is counted as a forest even though that's not true but it appears on remotely since data mostly still as a forest. So it depends a lot on what you measure how you measure it and this is a little bit of the danger that each country will try to show off and slightly modify the way something is measured to the countries advantage. So this is I think is some challenge we are facing but also maybe we shouldn't make a contest between countries in trying to show off maybe we just need to change their mentality that they are openly and honestly and transparently reporting. So it has been already mentioned but I think transparency and openness I think is a very important component of all this processes. Yes, localization of STGs is very important for many actions. And of course these localization STGs have to be really based on their culture, their history, their industrial composition and the level of investment and development. And this is a very important you know the openness and I mean the transparency is for especially for their investors. It's very important in order to respect the culture of course you know I mean there we have to think about inclusiveness when in the outside investor invest something to the region. Elena Ostrom you know I mean there is a few risks that she made. We have to be really careful with their with the local condition. But I have one problem when especially as in related to the Stephens you know I mean the citizen participatory approach. We are like Miss Greta you know I mean they're all having to get upset with our physical condition of the earth. But it's we don't have that can rule in the cyber space in the data. People can make use of their citizen participatory data and can manipulate it. I mean there or some people just you know, I mean there does not make this data open. And then, for example, I mean that we are in China. If I'm there, I come present of the IT company I can identify clean water place. Then we sell we sell this information to their to the industry and build some some some you know I mean their factory there. Before we find out some clean a polluted in an air place. Then we don't want to sell in life insurance to that kind of city, because it is bad, you know, so I don't know how to manage this kind of you know we don't have a good rule and good, you know, I mean their management skill of the cyber space. Yet, stop. Sorry, I changed the subject to me. Thank you very much. There is a question that is for can but I think it's going to be for everyone that is quite interesting. So these researchers for Philippine is arguing that sometimes government and NGOs can work together so there are among these public bodies and NGOs, but they are far short in meeting the SDGs. So, the research is asking whether and which is the role of scientists to look at find out new solutions or how we can better, you know, enter in the in the dialogue within them and make a change. If you have any inside or experience. Yes. I think that our scientists role is very important. For example, I have been working in the water pollution area for the last 30 years. No governmental director work for same field for 30 years. So usually director change every three years was two years and president are Prime Minister in my case changes, you know, every few years, obviously with longer than others. But there are our role is to bridge between new director, a continuity of the policy. That is, I think the one of the role not all entire role. So, and we are main product of the university faculty is a student. We have a lot of support in order to continue this kind of inertia of their, you know, policy, which we believe it is true, but we also have to be the truth is we have to decide it's not only by us but with the many stakeholders. So our role is a continuity of the policy. Thank you, Julian or Stefan, if you want to stage. Yeah, I think I agree with what was just said. I think there is also some a responsibility for scientists to engage with with policymakers I think this is really important and I think if we want to have an impact the scientists on the world on improving the world. We need to engage that that we need to get into a dialogue with the policymakers, and it's about a two way, a two way communication. And we need to also understand the policymakers more in order to know what what prescription for the planet we give to the to the policymakers is best but just to come back to what you said about companies and I agree with you. Working also with companies and, you know, making sure the investments of companies owning most of the money besides some foundations, where we are not sure yet if that they are completely free of interest. If, if the companies are working closer with this port with scientists that is critical. Also, there is the opportunity to work with companies to that they can open up their data because as we know, without good data we cannot really understand where we are going and companies to own massive amounts of data, scientists could potentially play a role in facilitating the so called pre competitive space for discussion about opening up data sets. I think this is a very interesting field, and some companies are prepared to actually open up their data, if the other companies are also doing it, if all agree, we need that. So that's happened with COVID now with with Apple and and, but we don't need a disaster for that we need, or COVID we need, we need this in principle as a way forward, forward you said to treat to treat the planet and to. So this is a discussion with which which is a very interesting and important one. Thank you. This is also answering the last question about how to engage industries on SDGs and I think is transparency and and cooperation. So, if Juliana would like to answer and then we are going to wrap up. I can, I can be very brief because I see time is running out and maybe also others like me have other meetings at 1230, but I agree with what was said so far and we need to engage if you want our science to have an impact. Of course, we can also just enjoy science as a scientific curiosity, but if you want to have an impact you need to engage what we are doing, for instance, in the field of natural hazards is to is to work in deal with both the public and the private sector. And this dialogue, as it was already said, it has to be two ways because we also have a lot to learn it's not scientists telling policymakers or decision makers what to do but rather is a is a co production of knowledge and it is also the way in which science advances. Thank you. Yes. I'm amazed with the questions and responses given by our speakers. We can continue talking more and more there is no limit to the things that we need to discuss but we have to end the session, our beloved symposium in three minutes so I would like to thank our speakers for being here with us today and sharing their insights, which has not been easy to really set up this at this difficult challenging time but we really appreciate their willingness. It's very valuable. I would also like to acknowledge the amazing efforts put my call by my colleagues, Jonathan Ritzy, Gabriella, Nobri, Chiara, Markina and Julia Roder, who directed the discussion part today. It has been going on for a very long time and it was still ongoing until one, two days ago. So it's been a really good experience for us too and we hope that the symposium had reached its objectives. You can reach to us or our speakers where our personal emails, the presentations will be available on the symposium page and yeah, the geosciences will become more and more prominent in the coming years. It's going to be more popular because we need it. We need it a lot and we hope to bring the discussion forward in other platforms in the next few years. So thanks for joining.