 Our presence as a species, as a human species, is becoming geologically traceable on this planet. We live in the age of the Anthropocene, an age which in geological terms is now being fundamentally altered by human activity. But it is not only doom and gloom. The Anthropocene is also about human ingenuity, about the power to understand, to rethink, to reinvent and make the presence of soon 10 billion people on this planet more sustainable. A couple of images I just want to show that demonstrate the scale and speed and pace of change that we as humans have created on this planet. Coral reefs, something most of us never see, are aware that they exist. Climate change, acidification has led to extraordinary events of coral reef bleaching which will affect not only the ecology locally, but indeed life in the oceans in terms of biodiversity, fish stocks and also the natural defenses on coastlines. Let me take you to another image in the Amazon. A little innocent road is built. Great thing for local communities, great thing for business. And you might think that its consequences in terms of the impact on the ecosystem and the economy can be managed in minimal. And here you see unintended consequences, very beneficial for some of great negative consequences for most. Through that lens of what is happening, we are beginning to also identify the priorities for change. And that is why we are here at the World Economic Forum, because what drives these changes is not just people it is, our economy is the kind of decisions we make, be it choices in terms of energy, infrastructure, urbanization and many other aspects. For me the good news of that story is that so much of the damage that we have seen has actually occurred only in the last 20, 30 or 40 years. And that makes me feel optimistic that we can turn it around in the next 20, 30 or 40 years. This isn't something that is intrinsic to the entire history of industrialization. So this is NASA data that shows the increase in global temperature. We now know that the Earth as a whole has warmed just about one degree centigrade since the Industrial Revolution. But again, that's an average. What's most alarming about this is not so much the global average, but what this looks like in any one particular place. And what we know from the satellite data is that the actual warming in the northern latitudes in the northern hemisphere is reaching six degrees centigrade already. We have seen massive losses of Arctic ice just in the last 20 to 30 years. And in particular the old ice, the thick ice is rapidly disappearing. This has impacts on biodiversity, it has impacts on the native populations of the polar regions and it has impacts on ocean circulation which can ramify throughout the globe and affect things like the Gulf Stream so that the ice and the Arctic can affect the weather in London. And Arctic warming translates into phenomena such as sea level rise. Many people still don't recognize that we are now talking about at least somewhere around a meter. And this is a conservative scenario of sea level rise by the end of this century. Well, for many countries, it first of all means they will cease to exist. In the Pacific, in the Caribbean, for millions of people it will destroy their entire livelihood. So here are two model results for what the ultimate effect of a two degree warming on the globe would be as it plays out over the next century over two. And this is what happens to the city of Shanghai, a city of 24 million people today, probably 30 or 40 million at some point in the future. The blue areas are the areas that are inundated. Now, you can see that at two degrees, a level that we often talk about as the safe limit, we're looking at the inundation of nearly half of the city of Shanghai. If we follow a business as usual trajectory and move into the area of four degrees, we see that Shanghai is almost entirely inundated. And just think for a moment about the economic, the social, the political consequences of the loss of a city like Shanghai. And now multiply that across the globe. Urbanization will double in the next four decades compared to what we have achieved since the beginning of human history and urbanization. That is the magnitude of change, but also the opportunity to rethink how we develop our urban infrastructure, resource efficiency, managing waste, energy efficiency in buildings, and also new opportunities with renewable energy. We want you to be motivated, we want you to feel the significance of this issue, but we also want you to be thinking about ways in which there are pathways forward. Cities are much more energy efficient than rural and suburban areas, by and large. And how efficient they are depends tremendously on how people live and how cities are planned. So how we plan our cities, how our cities grow in the next 10 or 20 years can make a huge impact on our carbon footprint. If the major cities of the world can plan effectively and control their greenhouse gas emissions, the potential for addressing this problem in a very dramatic way is very great. Isn't this an extraordinary opportunity to do things differently, more intelligently, and not repeat the mistakes of living in an age of plenty or the cornucopia of the planet? We need to manage risks, we have done it for millennia, and we also need to keep doing it now. Don't look to scientists to give you the 100% guarantee. What science gives us as a society is another way to look at what is happening and then make informed judgments and ever more informed judgments. And that is something that has to translate into the public debate. We have a lot of data sets available today. We can begin to understand the planet as a system, an ecological system, but also a social and economic system. To be able to depict those trends in visual images and also in trend lines over time allows people to relate to the information very differently. You know, I've often had this discussion about, I don't believe in climate science. Sorry, this is not about belief, this is not about religion. This is about knowledge, imperfect as it is, upon which we must take decisions from which there is no point of return if we don't act. And I think that is where we have arrived today. And from there suddenly, as the economists have often gotten it wrong, extraordinary opportunities arise. And few people realize that the solar industry in the US today already employs more than the entire oil and gas exploration sector in the US. Now who would have thought that? Actually more than half of all newly installed electricity generating infrastructure last year was renewable, excluding hydro. This is an energy revolution and it is now happening in Africa and Latin America and I think within the next 10 years the energy companies, the energy business models are going to be disrupted fundamentally and changing our energy economy. This is the foundation upon which I think humanity arrived in Paris in 2015 and took a number of far-reaching choices, rational behavior, in the absence of perfect knowledge but with the imperative to act.