 Let us start. It is really my great pleasure to open this second day of what is our flagship conference monetary policy conference, I should say, called Ritching Science and Practice today, and I'm really very pleased and honored to announce that today's keynote speech will be given by Lars Peter Hansen who is the David Rockefeller Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago and he is also a 2013 recipient of the Nobel Prize in economics shared with Eugene Ephama and Robert J. Schiller The methods that he has developed are widely used in empirical research in financial economics today and the Nobel Prize recognized his work on his work on the empirical empirical analysis of asset prices which has been used to test theories and models that have shaped our understanding of asset pricing and and there is probably no a graduate student of economics who has not used Professor Hansen's generalized methods of moments or GMM estimators his recent research attempts to quantify ways to model economic behavior when consumers and investors struggle with uncertainty about the future This work is highly relevant with respect to the uncertainty arising from climate change and the challenges resulting from it for for policy makers And I'm very pleased that Professor Hansen will share today with us some insights from his recent work on the challenges for central banks posed by uncertain climate change Uncertainty about how climate change interacts with the economy and the resulting macroeconomic policy consequences His observations are highly relevant for us as policy makers including central banks and supervisors And we share the views expressed by Professor Hansen and others that governments and parliaments have the primary responsibility to act on climate change At the same time within our mandate We at the ECB are committed to ensuring that the ECB takes into account the implications of climate change and the carbon transition in its monetary and supervisory policies To include climate change considerations in our monetary policy framework The governing council on the 8th of July 2021 Decided on a comprehensive action plan to include climate change considerations into its monetary policy framework And we have published an ambitious roadmap with concrete timelines for seeing a wide range of actions Among other things we aim to enhance the analytical capacity at the ECB in macroeconomic modeling to account for the impact of climate change on economic activity and inflation and on the monetary policy transmission Moreover, we have also set ourselves clear targets with respect to including climate change considerations in monetary policy operations in the areas of disclosure, risk management, collateral framework and corporate sector asset purchases Being conscious about the systemic risks related to climate change for the financial sector Climate-related risks will be an essential part of financial stability monitoring and prudential supervision of banks A few weeks ago, the ECB published its first economy-wide climate stress test concluding that firms and banks will be severely affected if climate change issues are not addressed And we have to act now Short-term costs for an orderly and swift transition to a zero carbon economy outweigh the costs over medium to longer term We will incorporate the experiences and lessons learned from this economy-wide stress test into the climate stress test of the euro system's own balance sheet and the bottom-up stress test by our banking supervisors Both stress tests are planned for next year Now, when they're telling you about all these things, I am aware of the skepticism that Professor Hansen recently voiced with respect to central banks and supervisors' ability to conduct these types of analyses And he is right to stress the highly uncertain relations between climate change, the macroeconomy, the financial system, and policy instruments And it is a great challenge to deal with this uncertainty when designing and revising our internal models and instruments As policymakers, we should not downplay the knowledge gaps that remain No one knows what combination of physical risks and transition risks will materialize in the upcoming decades We just know that a combination will materialize And to this, we need to adapt And there is no better way to kick-start this process than to start with imperfect data and analytical tools and improve as we learn more as physical and transition risks unfold Because the latter will not wait When we will embark on addressing the challenges emerging from climate change at the ECB, we will carefully listen to the evolving findings and insights of academics in both natural and economic sciences And I'm therefore particularly happy that we have today one of the leading thinkers in this field to share his thoughts with us I'm looking tremendously forward to an interesting talk and an enriching Q&A session And without further ado, and I've spoken much too long already Let me now give the floor to you, Professor Hans