 Now we're going to discuss some of the benefits and challenges of the integration that Lawrence brought up in his keynote and we have this morning and distinguished panel experts to have that discussion. As the panelists come up to the stage, I will give you some background on each of them. Dr. Dr. Tan Yu-chang is a secretary general of the Ministry of Water, Land and Natural Resources of Malaysia and his responsibilities include overseeing the sustainable development of the water supply and sewer services industry as well as performing managerial functions in the ministry. His main tasks focus on the formulation, implementation and review of policy directions and the regulatory framework of Malaysia's water services. Bernadette Konant is the CEO of the Canadian Water Network. She leads her team to work to improve the application of water research to decisions for water management. She founded the Canadian Municipal Water Consortium, whose members, which include leaders from progressive municipalities as well as industry and academic partners, to collaborate on critical water wastewater and storm water challenges. Sylvan Usher is the executive director of the African Water Association based in Cote d'Ivoire and their objectives include to coordinate the search for knowledge and the latest developments in the technical, legal, administrative and economic fields for drinking water and sanitation as well as promoting the exchange of information and initiating professional training. Jianwu is the president of the Potan Environment Group Limited in Beijing, China. They provide environmental services in China and internationally. They offer smart water environment management systems, invest in, implement, operate and manage water supply, sewage treatment and reclaimed water reuse projects and are involved in integrated management of water services and build sponge cities and water ecological towns. So now we have about 20 minutes for discussion and I will start out with an initial question for each of the panelists to answer and then help guide the discussion along the way. So no more than two minutes for this first question. So Copenhagen has been able to address climate change and sustainability through an integrated utility, though not without challenges. So in two minutes each, no more than two minutes, can you describe the most critical challenges you have faced in trying to integrate sectors, services or sustainability objectives in your work? And let's start with you, Dr Tan. Thank you, Ebi. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. In the Malaysia context, the integration of utilities, particularly water industry, there are three major challenges faced by the Malaysian government. So firstly, about the political will. So second, about the institutional reform. And third, with regards to the execution. So let me start with the first point, political will. Due to the complexities and fragmented of the water industry in Malaysia, there are several ministries involved in this program and activity, particularly the policy formulations. Previously, we have Ministry of Energy, Water and Green Technology. With the new government, we formed the new ministry on 2nd July this year. The name of the new ministry is Ministry of Water, Land and Natural Resources. The main objective of this ministry is to integrate the water resources, water services and sewage and also irrigation into one ministry. And we come out with a new water management framework. And also, we would like to incorporate in the land, so land is part of the ministry, play a very significant role, and also the natural resources. We combine the water sector into the natural resources in terms of water, land, and particularly the conservation and sustainability. We need the strong political will to transform the industry. Particularly in Malaysia context, we have federal government and state government. So constitution, power, segregation of power between 14 states and also the federal government. So with that strong political will, we can engage with the state. Then they come up with the integrated water management policy. The second point I need to highlight here is the institutional reform. So as I mentioned earlier, due to the complexity, now we form these cats, we call it acronym called cats. So this ministry, mainly responsible for the policy formulation, legislation, guidelines, and monitoring. Then how we want to come up with a good policy and turn into best practices. Firstly, we have the National Water Resources Council, headed by Deputy Prime Minister. Now with the new ministry, we would like to propose the National Water Council more holistic and more integrated. We'll be headed by the Prime Minister. And second, this National Water Resources Policy and National Water Services Commission. And also, we have this National Water Services Act. So we integrate all this major policy and turn into the water integrated management framework. Thank you. We'll talk more about that integrated framework in a second. Bernadette, move on to Bernadette if you'd like to. Thanks. Thank you to Abby and to Hela and Lars and also to IWA for the privilege and the pleasure to be here and continuing the important conversation. And I think continuing that conversation is going to be a key theme. So Canadian Water Network works with municipalities, but government, private sector across Canada. We're one of those bridge organizations that Mark Van Lutstuk talked about yesterday, with the express purpose of helping them either accelerate, advance, or improve water management decisions. So what that does is help us focus on the driver side of the decision. So, you know, in answer to your question, it's not what I have seen, but I'll give you my sort of Canadian perspective on what we've seen as the barriers, and particularly for utilities in terms of the question. And they really come down to two big things. Number one is governance, and I'm sure we're going to talk a lot about that. And our CEO, one of our most innovative utilities and Halifax always points to that and said, if you get the governance right, the rest can flow. If we're talking innovation like we have, I might sort of have a code, a subsection of those is culture and clear goals for that governance. But that structure is definitely number one. And the second big one I would say is actually trust, and I'll talk about that really briefly. So the governance is really what we're talking a lot about here, about how we organize ourselves. And in our case, not just how we organize the doing, but how we organize the access and making sense. So really, when I talk about what Canadian Water Network does, we try to help make sense of all the information that's out there for decisions. And that requires that we organize or the challenges are organizing in a way that does two things. One, the integration needs to be enabled. So you've got to create mechanisms that allow that to happen. And Dr. Tan talked about some of those reforms specifically focused on that. And the other, it has to require integration. So integration doesn't happen for integration's sake. And we talked about that or multidisciplinary for the sake of being multidisciplinary. So things like Lars talked about the ability to have a goal like we must be carbon neutral that causes his integrated utilities to go towards that and others. So those were clear. The other one I said was trust. And I think it's not a new one, but it's the biggest one. A phrase that I often used over the years, particularly when we were working with the academic and the knowledge sector, was when it comes to decisions, it doesn't matter how right you are if nobody believes you. And we really have generated culture. We're so focused on being right, but that doesn't mean we're effective. And so, when I went to many of the sessions that talked about, well, how are you able to do it? And we talked about culture change and things like that in the sessions yesterday, but it really comes down to if people feel that you're not talking to them. So I'm not a big fan. I have to tell this group I'm not a big fan of the use of we must educate everybody. If everybody understood all the facts, we would do the right thing because I don't think, I think there's too much for all of us to be educated. I think the bigger issue for our utilities is trust. It's the same thing we use inside companies. If you trust that we have a shared goal, we might have a discussion about, well, you're going to do it one way. I think you would do it another way, but we're not feeling that we're having a battle over the goal. So moving from education to engagement and getting trust is a big one. And I actually am a pragmatic optimist. Because right now the trust in governments is very low. Generally, at least in Western hemisphere countries, and if you look at a article that was in the paper in Canada last week, trust in scientists is decreasing. So rather than wring our hands on that, I would say the opportunity is to become a trusted place to look for. If you believe that people have the same goal that, so those gaining those two things we think are, or what we see are at the core of it. Great, thank you, Bernadette. Jian, can you give us a perspective from China? Yes, thanks Abby. I come from China and also from the private sectors, so I can provide some of the perspective from both private sectors and from China perspective. As you know in the recent years, Chinese central government has paid much more attention to sustainability and environmental improvement, and which created huge opportunities for the business and also for the investment. For the next five years, we estimated that it's gonna be about around two trillion US dollars will be invested in the local utilities around the countries. As a private sector, we have participated over about 30 local utility schemes through the public private partnership, which called PPP schemes. There's many challenges around the implementation stage of that, but that's too most important. One is how you convince the local municipalities to develop integrated utility schemes, which really needs to start from the feasibility study, the mass plans, which are not only sure looking at water, and wastewater, but also you need to look at how to control the stormwater control, the flood controls, and also connected with the entire river basins. So it's more an integrated process and assistance, not only address the water supply and wastewater treatment, but also the entire river basin and for the entire regions. So in China, it's sometimes easy because all you need to do is to convince the mayor or the party secretaries, because we have a very strong government, and but the really, the devil is in the details, which is how you coordinate with all the different departments when doing the implementation stage. So that's the first one. The second one is really how you help the local government to pay for it, because it's really, through the financing, you can build it and you can implement it during the starting stage, but how to help the government to pay for it. Now you really need to look at it, how to create a value for the cities. Not only you clean up the river basin, but also you create it, maybe you need to do the landscaping around the river bankings and to make the municipalities and the cities more livable, and people want to live theirs and create land values or create social values for the entire cities, and also to also help the local government to introduce and to attract more business and maybe healthcare business, more business into cities. So at the end, the government can pay for those schemes. Great, thank you very much. Sylvan, the water association covers all of Africa, so you're working with lots of countries. What are the challenges that your member countries face? Yes, thank you very much, Abhi, for this question, and thank you for International Water Association to inviting me. I think as an association of water and sanitation utilities, I will speak as the perspective of utilities. I think that first of all, in military service providing, Africa started earlier, I mean Africa started in the 60s when utilities that were doing energy were also doing water, providing water to the population, but in the late 70s and 80s, things were changing and separation was coming in, and the two sector were definitely working at a separate level, but today we don't really see if there could be an advantage with the concept of military service providing. In this, we have encountered, let's say, four factors that definitely are giving us some insight on what is happening. First of all, there's not enough decentralization. I mean, municipalities, some municipalities are very young, so they cannot really think about, at this level, think about having military service, providing service, providing in water or in sanitation or in energy. Also, what we have encountered is that in most of the African French-speaking country, you have one utilities that is providing for the whole country. So, with decentralization, that is not really effective, it is difficult for the municipalities to have a choice on what they're doing. Secondly, when they have been empowered, meaning in places where municipalities are running things quite well, the funds are missing. Like my predecessor said, money is something that the municipality needs to implement this kind of aspect. The third aspect is the population. The potential customer for these utilities, the potential number is still quite small. So it should be quite difficult for a big company trying to do military service to have enough customer to really run properly the business. And the fourth aspect is regulation. Regulation is important in this kind of thing. We need to have a very strong regulator because so many things can happen with a military service company inside the economy of this company. So we need to have a very important eye on that. So, military service is good, I think, but in Africa we still need to look at it very closely. Yeah, thank you very much, Sylvan. So, the last point there you made about regulation. We've got a couple of countries here with quite a strong central government and strong mandates in China and Malaysia. Dr. Tan, you mentioned at the end of your speech about the integrated water framework. So I'm wondering how your ministry actually cascades down this intention for integration to the utilities themselves to actually enact on that. So, very good question. So, just now I mentioned about the two elements. First is the political will. Second is the institutional reform. And the third aspect is the execution, that the how aspect. So, through our newly established ministry and also the National Water Services Commission, we regulate the industry via licensing. We give the water operator, water utilities company, issue the license, we set the KPI for them in order to comply with the KPIs for the water quality, the CAPEX, how to come up with the new CAPEX. At the same time, we have the Water Asset Management Corporation. So, we provide fund for the water operator to come up with the new projects and a program for the new CAPEX developments. So, it's very important. The funding is important. We have the good policy, but in terms of execution, we need to engage with the various stakeholders. Again, our stakeholders, inclusive of the water operator and all the state, all the state, because we want to share the integrated water policy with the state to buy in. So, in terms of jurisdictions, we are clear. So, we focus on the policy formulation. The state focus on the implementation, the execution part. So, that is the main concern. So, again, we integrate these three major challenges and from the policy, we turn into practices. Practices. At the same time, with the strong political will, I strongly believe we can really transform the industry. Towards water resilience and sustainability. So, that is our ultimate objective of the new way forward and the new direction of our new ministry. And at the same time, we have just established the vision and mission objective and the shape value for the ministry. The next step, we come up with the strategic action plan. So, for this congress and when we gather the new input, then we can formulate the good action plans in the future. Great, thank you. So, Bernadette in Canada, the system is a bit more decentralized, not quite as top-down. And you talked a lot about governments, governance, trust, and culture. So, how does it work in Canada with the various municipal level utilities and stakeholders? Right, well, you correctly thought, when I heard decentralized and we talked about systems, I think that that is a good description for government in Canada. And that probably describes or explains, in part, my view, that relying on these things. So, philosophically, having a proper institutional structure and all the right goals that require these things to happen, I think we're all in agreement. But I think in Canada, it's very difficult to make that work. So, it's really about how to make, all this making them work together is important. And we talked about in China or Singapore, there is no Lee Kuan Yew equivalent in Canada who would just say make it so. For those of you who are more familiar with the US system, in Canada, for instance, for drinking water, the federal government puts out guidelines for safety. They're not federally enforceable standards. Almost all the decisions that are made, there are, excuse me, there's some regulations, particularly on the wastewater side, that set limits for discharge. But by and large, the activities that happen, the governance pieces that really matter are at the provincial or state level. And in practice on the ground, it's how those are implemented in terms of licensing, in terms of approvals that really make it work. So actually working with those, I would say the utilities in my estimation in the last 15, 20 years are the ones that are taking the lead. I tend to say that Canada's a lead from the middle country rather than top, down, or bottom up. And so that maybe explains my emphasis on trust because it's really about trying to find where the ability to move in the existing system is and then make a case for changes to go forward. So by nature, just by nature of the very system, we get better progress when we work within it and try to build sort of coalitions if you like for progress than we do about sort of lobbying and institutional reform. So that's much more part of the Canadian culture as a people, but also it's necessitated by the system. Makes sense. So Sylvan had mentioned that financing is a big issue, but Jean, you said that you have two trillion dollars worth of investment from the central government as a private utility working with those governments. Do you have an easier time integrating services in your utilities then, or is it still trying to convince the municipalities the benefits of integration and sponge cities? It's a good question and often time, I'll perplex myself on that question as well. So I think in China, well, first of all, two trillion is the amount of money which is needed for the plan which it lay out by the central government. It doesn't mean the central government will spend on the money, but the money is needs to be collected. I think every municipality is most of the municipality in China, they want to do it because a lot of times it started from the scratch, especially for the rural areas. It's not really where the, I think it's easier to convince that the party secretary in the mayor of the city say you need to start from as integrated systems, from the beginning with the mass plannings, with the feasibility study, but I think it's, the biggest challenge is you need to convince them in how to come up with the monies. Not only the financing part of, because the banking one can do that, but also how to pay back for it. And so that's, what we need to do is to help the local government is not only looking at how to establish those infrastructures, but also help them to say after you improve the living standards, the environmental conditions of the local cities and how to create values and economic and social values, which is, one is land values in China, there's a lot of social value on that is on the land. The other is to attract the travelers, to attract the people to come to your city to spend the monies. And also to help the local government to attract new business. Now in China, we call it upgraded consumptions, which mainly green consumption, like healthcare, sports, recreation. So it's easier for us to ask the government to say you need to do that in the right way, and but also you need to help them say how to pay for the right ways. Yeah, makes sense. So Sylvan changed it a little bit, but Lars mentioned the emerging leaders program that they do in Copenhagen. And I'm wondering from your perspective, what do we need to be doing to set the stage for future generations to manage utilities in an integrated way? And what are you doing with the Africa Water Association? Okay, I think if we come back on the military service aspect of what we're dealing with, I would like to distinguish two things. First of all, the military service, the municipality's utility, which is military service that military policy owns and a private utility contracting with a municipality, which is another aspect of the thing. The issue that we have here is transfer of competencies in the water and sanitation sector in most of the African cities. When you look at the English speaking countries in Africa, they are decentralized, meaning that utilities are from the local government and they work for the local government and are monitored by the local government. In the French speaking countries, you mostly have a utility that provides service all over the country. And unfortunately in these cases, the transfer of competence from the main government to the local government for water or sanitation or even energy is not effective. So that's where the issue comes because I think that military service providers work for the municipalities. It is the municipalities that have all these aspects to be dealing with. We at the African Water Association are looking for the years to come really to empower young water professionals. We have a young water professional network that is growing and growing. And these young water professionals are really oriented with the high level technical engineers or MDs or water utilities. And we are really pushing them, pushing the utilities to empower more and more young water professionals. But this is definitely things for the future. They have brilliant solution. We saw here at the Innovative Sessions, many young guys with very, very good ideas. And I think this can help at a level for the military service providers at a time to come, definitely. That's great. So on that note, I think we are out of time, but I'm glad to end on that. And I think just to summarize the discussion, it's not really so much the technical barriers that prevent integration, but it's very much institutional ones. And I think it's different based on where you are, whether it's about political will or governance or sort of government collaboration with municipalities or if it's just empowering the next generation to be able to do this. But, and then of course financing, I think we didn't get a chance to talk about that, but so it's good to hear that we're sort of focusing on empowering people, whether that's through building trust or building the next leaders. But thank you to each of the panelists. If you can join me in thanking the panelists for the interesting discussion. Thank you.