 And now we're going to have a panel. And the panel moderator is going to be Dr. Akissa Bari. Dr. Akissa Bari is professor at the National Agricultural Institute of Tunisia. She obtained her PhD in water resources engineering from the Institute of Science and Technology in Lund University in Sweden. And she's been director for Africa at the International Water Management Institute, so therefore, a relationship with our keynote speaker as well. And she's been coordinator of the African Water Facility at the African Development Bank. So please welcome Dr. Akissa Bari. Thank you, Daniel. Thank you, Daniel. And good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I would like first to thank Claudia for this very interesting, very nice presentation. That is really setting the stage when we think about the SDG6, how centrally it is for all the other SDGs, and also showing the challenges that we have moving from the MDG to the SDGs. Very ambitious, I mean, targets. But also, we have to put them and we are all on the same boat and we have no other solution then to address them and to really try to achieve them. So thank you very much, Claudia. Now I would like to call for panelists to come on the stage. And we are looking for a very interesting panel with four eminent specialists and panelists that I will very shortly introduce because they have very impressive CVs and I'm sure that you are familiar with several of them. So I will start with Dr. Qianqin Lai, who is the director general of the Water Resources Agency of Chinese Taipei. We also have Mrs. Cindy Wallis-Lage, who is the president of Lake Envych Global Water Business. Mr. Peter Simpson, who is the chief executive of Anglian Water Group. And Ms. Catherine Sylvester, who is a planner at Sydney Water. So just for kicking off the discussion, I'm going to address a few questions to each one of them. And we would like really to have a lively discussion in order to be, I mean, to discuss because we have seen that we are really not on track to achieve the STG6, but what needs to be done. So we would like to have your perspective and how we are going to really take on this challenge and to be able to move on. So Dr. Lai, so the STGs were adopted three years ago and they have been observation that the concept, the specific targets and the means of implementation have remained at the international policy level and have not trickled down to the practitioners in the public and private sector. From your perspective, is that true? Do you feel there should be a greater effort to engage practitioners in the implementation of action towards the STG6 in particular? And what do you see at the major stumbling blocks? Yeah, as the courtiers told before, we are not on the tracks on the STGs. And because I'm working for the government and most of the people think that the determination of the government was the major factor to meet the STGs. But according to the old idioms of Chinese, water is the highest goodness for all and water is not competitive. But in the practice, we always fight for the water. And I will say an example in Taiwan. A long time ago, most of the water was supplied for irrigation. So we have irrigation associations. They get water rights. So much of water comes from the water rights and that used for the agriculture. But in recent times, domestic and industrial use a lot of water. So we need to take water from the agricultural centers. But every center is always thinking about their own benefits. I think the biggest problem is there. So I believe if I can solve my problems in the beginning, I should solve the other center's problems. So we set a panel to discuss how we use water. And we set the information. And we set a transparency system in Taiwan to make the different center to believe that the water is used in efficiency. So after that, the industrial center and the domestic center can use the water and come from the irrigation center. So I think the major aspect is not only on the moral aspect. And such kind of things could be set on the mechanism. So I think the efficiency governance is based on the transparency information. So I think a good solution for solving such kind of problem is transparency governance. Thank you. Transparency governance. I think important things to keep in mind. Mrs. Lage, the ATG6 aims to integrate a range of water issues. And we have seen, I mean, in previous presentation, all things that we have to take into account. And in your work, where do you see the opportunities to establish the strategic links to approach ATG6 in a holistic manner? Which investments in innovative water systems can help people gain more resilience and manage the deep uncertainties we now face? Thank you. And thanks for being on such a great panel. I'm very excited to be here and to have the opportunity to communicate with many of you. When thinking about this, one of the things that comes to my mind is tremendous. I put a wonderful presentation together to talk about all of the things that we can do. And I think that's a critical thing, is how do we change our mindset? Because we talk about the fundamental role that water plays in life. And we think about it as a humanitarian need and a basic right. And that's all very, very true. But we also need to change the mindset and the communications. And when I think about that, I think along two words that we need to think about more with water. And that is that water can be a unifier and then it can be a multiplier. And when we start thinking about it, from all that we could do, if we just approached things differently. And if we think about it from the unifying sense, we think about how it can unify communities, a basin as we look at the best use of that water, how it can drive economic development, how it can drive health, how it can drive jobs, how it can drive the best use for every drop. And that applies whether it's a developed country or whether it's a developing country and seeing how it can unify those communities and unify solutions to be much more holistic. As we look at that along the lines of SDG in an integrated planning manner that that best use for the community for those drops and being much more holistic in our thinking. And then you think about it from the multiplying standpoint. A fabulous conversation of if we do not succeed on SDG6, we impact all of the other SDGs. And so our ability to multiply the impact to really make a difference in the world, to really make a difference in our SDG goals, our Sustainable Development Goals, is that we want to make sure that we are successful with SDG6 and it is critical for us to do that. And that is that integrated solutions that can be put forward. And so when you think about innovation that we can do, we can do so much more in the way that we do planning. We can do so much more in the way we communicate, whether it's governance, whether it's having connections between water utilities and wastewater utilities as opposed to operating them independently. We can do so much more when we think about it from a technology and how we apply that around the world to get away from the linear thinking and be much more circular. If a person can survive for a year in the space station and talk about circular and all of the uses that we have to be able to do things there, we can be able to do a whole lot more in our everyday thinking and our everyday uses. I always had the opportunity yesterday to attend the session on the intermittent water supply, which I thought was a really fascinating discussion and I really appreciated having that conversation yesterday. And within that, if you think about the things that we could do if we were able to tackle that challenge and see success, if we were able to do more in that intermittent water supply, it's not talking about getting to 24-7 though, as a human we all would like to see that happen, but it's really getting to the point where it is going to be a sustainable system, part of our goals, that it's going to be reliable, that we know it's going to happen every day, that it's going to be predictable, that we know when it's going to happen, and that the quality is going to be what it's supposed to be so that we know we can use it. And that's going to drive greater efficiency in our communities because there's going to be then the ability to rely on that water. It's going to be more efficient because we're not going to be wasting with the need to hoard water. And so I think there's just a lot more that we can do in cracking that and being able to get that piece of it fixed because we may not have enough supply, as was mentioned previously. There is a supply challenge, but we need to make sure that we are credible in when we are supplying and making sure that we're meeting people's needs. Thank you, Mrs. Leitch. So, I mean, important points that you also raised change of mindset, which was one of the most difficult things, water as a unifier and multiplier, but also how much we have to bring, I mean, if we don't achieve, SDG6, it is going to impact all the others. But I mean, I also sometimes wonder, we are all water people here. Don't we need to bring other people to really, I mean, because of the centrality of water, to bring other people on board in order to be able to understand the importance of water and to be able to achieve the other SDGs? I completely agree. I think one of the challenges that we have in the water sector is we talk to ourselves a lot and we pat each other's back and we're doing a good job, but until we go broader than that, until we bring in the businesses, the manufacturing, the agricultural, there are so many that influence because everybody's using water. So if we don't have everybody at the table, we're not gonna have a holistic solution and you're not gonna have buy-in to that solution even more importantly, because then it's something that's being pushed out. So how we create those platforms to talk to a broader audience, to engage with that audience makes a huge difference. And I think that's part of that integrated planning. Frankly, is who is at the table? It is not just the utilities. It has got to be much broader in all of the stakeholders in the community that are participating in that conversation. So this is also a call for IWA in order how we can bring more other people from other sectors on board. Mr. Simpson, footing the bill of achieving the SDGs is a daunting challenge. SMAs for SDGs 6.1 and 6.2 alone amount to $140 billion per year until 2030. Even when including all financial sources, public and private, the financial gap is huge, 80%. The private sector funding will have to be the predominant investor. So there is a need for new financing paradigms. Blended finance may be one of them. So what is your take on opportunities to maximize funding to meet the SDGs 6 target by 2030? How can we increase the efficiency of existing financial resources and mobilize additional and innovative forms of finances? What should be done in Sub-Saharan Africa where the private sector involvement is low and the total spending on water supply and sanitation is only 0.5%. So that's an easy one. Let me just start off by just talking about blended finance. So blended finance is the idea that there's lots of private capital around the world and the answer to closing that gap of 140 billion pounds a year to achieve the SDGs by 2030 is to engage that private capital and mix it with other forms of capital from overseas development aid and philanthropy and in that way come up with a better mix for funding the gap. That's sort of the theory behind it. In theory, yes, it makes sense, but actually I don't think it's a silver bullet because whenever you think about private capital, private capital and the providers of private capital have fiduciary duties to get risk-adjusted returns and that actually means you have to have countries that have tariff setting, they're billing, there's an income stream, there's a cash flow associated with it. So never mind how much you mix that with contributions from government and overseas development agencies and the like, you can never ultimately get to a point where that isn't important. And also there's an issue of sustainability because you have to have the cash flows over a longer period of time in order to satisfy the returns to private equity and private income. So I don't think it's the answer as a silver bullet but it's part of the mix, it's part of a toolkit of things that are there for us. But there are also some very fundamental things, I think, when we think about the challenges we face in terms of this particular SDG. And that's the fact that we're focusing globally but when we look at what shifts the dial the most, of course you can go to places like countries in sub-Saharan Africa and you can see that's where some of the biggest gaps exist and some of the lowest income countries. And they're exactly the sorts of countries which are really going to struggle to cope with, if you like the silver bullet of blended finance because generally they are incredibly low income and they will not have in the short term the ability to fund that. So one of the questions I have generally, I think for governments around the world is how we as countries deploy our overseas development aid and are we deploying too much of that to middle income countries who actually could make better use of their own taxes and deploy more of that money into water and sanitation and hygiene services and focusing more of the overseas development aid into water and sanitation and hygiene but also focusing it more into the requirements of the low income countries who fundamentally need some of the structures, some of the institutional structures and arrangements and regulation and legal changes to enable them to actually create a structure that will be more sustainable in the future and therefore attract more of that private equity. So in tackling the challenge, I suppose what occurs to me is it's almost how do we get the 20% for the 80% and I think when I look at it globally it occurs to me that we're probably not got the right mix of what we're doing and there's an opportunity here to focus more perhaps on the lower income countries, focus more on what we can do in terms of those institution strengthening. Middle income countries I think have to make better use of the resources they've already got to fund progress against these SDGs and better allocate essentially what scarce resources we have to have a bigger impact and a small example just came into my mind it's all very easy, you can seem like you're passing these sort of problems everywhere else and the reality is the challenge is for us here in the room and as a company we've done a lot of work in recent years in Nepal and it's one of those areas where we've been focusing together with WaterAid on sector strengthening and institutional strengthening because it is a country in that space of the LIC, the lower income and it's obvious to us that unless we help those countries of that particular country with some of the arrangements then we're not going to be able to attract the opportunity of the bigger bubble of private capital so I think they're great opportunities but I also think there are opportunities not just for governments to change what they're focusing on and prioritising and I think the Japanese government is particularly strong actually being here in Japan but focusing on water and sanitation and hygiene the biggest percentage I think of any government in terms of its overseas development age put into that area so stuff for governments to do to sort of copy that but there's also stuff that we can do as companies to actually help countries improve their institutions and make them, particularly the lower income countries better able to receive the bubble of private capital Thank you so it's a big challenge that we are facing and there is not one answer that we need but I fully agree with you I mean the importance of strengthening institutions because I mean it's clear even in sub-Saharan Africa and Africa, I mean how much governments have been putting money also in this sector and the role of aid so it's still quite a lot of things that we need to discuss and to think of Thank you Mrs. Sylvester so it's really going to follow up on what just Mr. Simpson said because in addition to the financial resources required to achieve the targets of the 2030 SDG agenda the other limiting factor is the human and institutional capacity so what are your thoughts on strengthening, focusing and maintaining a human resource-based and institutional capacity that can deliver on the intention of the SDGs? Thank you and I think at the plenary session yesterday afternoon and Peter just spoke about the need for capacity building in the developing world but I also think it's really important we're building capacity in the developed countries because I get really frustrated when I hear water professionals talk about the SDGs as it's, you know, we're already doing that it's almost suggesting that, you know, I'm tick the box I'm already contributing, I'm doing my job but there's so much more that needs to be done and we heard in the keynote today that we're not on track and there is a need to do more and it's not, I think it's sort of passing the buck if we say, oh, we don't have political will we don't have enough finance I think we need to look internally at our own organisations and do more than just benchmarking and showing how we're contributing to the goals now but use that framework to say well where are there opportunities to do more? It's not just about SDG 6 and I think there's a real role that maybe IWA can play or professionals or different organisations how they're using the goals to drive something different and I feel like that's where the capacity needs to be built in the developed world where can, like what is my role? What is our organisational role to do more than just business as usual? Thank you, thank you for, I mean, all your answers and great answers to have this question I think that time is running short so I would like just to say a few words in conclusion first of all, I think there's something that I would like to say that we need to value water I think this is something that is for me and very important to recognise that valuing water is a shared responsibility as we just heard and it is not and it is a duty and it is everyone's business it's something that maybe is not enough I mean this message is not enough shared by everybody and not the business of the water people and we are all on the same boat but we should consider the diverse benefits and risk provided by water and the deep connections between human needs, social and economic well-being spiritual beliefs because we often forget about this and the need of the ecosystems so we need to recognise that valuing and managing water represents a transformative opportunity to convert risk to resilience, poverty to well-being and degraded ecosystems to sustainable ones but while the SDG6 sets ambitious targets it also presents with the other SDG a great opportunity and we are aware of this to address what the security, public health and socioeconomic development so I think that we have to really be aware of that so there is a call for a paradigm shift call for change of mindset and practices call for transformation for innovations I think this is a so we need to invest innovations I think and but we need also visionaries people I think that someone like Tony Young I mean I'm really impressed by the way he looks at for example the cities and the IWA approach also we need these kinds of people to catalyze transformative innovation and this will facilitate a transition to a more viable world so we need transformational leadership and a new generation of water leaders with a vision I think this is also something that we are we should not I think underestimate the dynamics of politics and power and the challenge of governance but I want to finish as Claudia on an optimistic note and I think it's time for hope and for charting our path into the future thank you very much