 So, dear friends, I hope you had a little chance to have a look at our 20th anniversary overview of SCI achievements over the past 20 years. Very warmly welcome to this second Gordon Goodman lecture, and I welcome you on behalf both of the Stockholm Environment Institute, where I'm the executive director, my name is Iwan Oxtram, but also on behalf of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, and this is a joint initiative that we took to commemorate and also to invest in a continued legacy of Gordon Goodman, the founding director of the Stockholm Environment Institute in 1989. And Gunnar Akvistum, you may know the permanent secretary of the academy, had his final farewell party yesterday. He's stepping down as the permanent secretary of the academy, and he asked me to welcome you today on both behalf of the academy and SCI. As you know, this is something very important for SCI, very important for the academy, and it's a very good timing to have this second Gordon Goodman lecture today, as we speak, the Commission for Sustainable Development has had its finished its prep call meeting for Rio Plus 20, which is Stockholm Plus 40, and everyone realizes that we're not making the progress towards a transition towards sustainable development as we anticipated in Rio. We also know that as we speak, the Bonn conference of the UNFCCC starts, and to be honest, we know that even that process is, if not grinding to a halt, at least having great difficulties in providing the guidance for 200 countries in the world to collaborate and truly take a step towards bending the curves towards a safe climate future. We know that this is the UN year of biodiversity, and in Nagoya in October, the world gathers to unfortunately conclude that we are not going to meet the global target on bending the curve on extinction rates of biodiversity, while we're learning that biodiversity is the key for ecosystem services and human well-being. So it's a decisive year when, so to say, the multiple whammies of global sustainable development hits, so to say, simultaneously, and we realize that the era of incremental change is over. We need new thinking, we need new guidance into the future, and it's in that context that it's such a tremendous value, I would say, not only for the CIA and the Academy, but for the world to be able to draw upon the legacy of Gordon Goodman, and Gordon Goodman, as you know, was the head of the Bayer Institute, which then became the Bayer Institute of Ecological Economics, which is still housed here at the Academy, the founding director of the Stockholm Environment Institute, and a person who believed so deeply in a science-based approach to environment and development, and that we cannot exclude and separate these two entities, and that in fact it's so profoundly a question of linking the understanding of how the earth system operates with equity and empowerment issues. And last year, when we have our first inaugural Gordon Goodman lecture, we had the privilege of having Professor Ramanathan here to talk of the very dire predicament in terms of the functioning of the earth system in terms of climate, and it's typically in the spirit of Gordon Goodman to today embark on the challenge of equity and empowerment and the development angle of the large global sustainability challenges we're facing. I'd like to particularly, apart from welcoming all of you, which is fantastic to see, particularly to welcome Margaret and Kate Goodman. It's wonderful to have you here, Margaret. We missed you last year, but this year it's an enormous privilege to have the Gordon, the Goodman family with us again, and particularly you, Margaret, who's been following SEI and following Bayer over decades, and I know from all the mentoring discussions I had the privilege to have with Gordon when every time I called, which was once a month or so trying to take on the leadership of SEI, it was often Margaret whom I had the privilege to talk to first and realize how intimately linked you were to his thinking and the way the institute has developed over the decades. So the institute owes you a deep thank for the success that we've seen over the decades in our pursuit of a knowledge-based support to sustainable development. So thank you for honoring us today. We also have the honor to have the Indian ambassador to Sweden. Ambassador, it's a tremendous privilege to have you here as well and to honor us in this occasion. Now let's go into the subject, and of course I don't need to introduce Arsha Koshla, well known to all of us, well known to the world. I can't think of any person who has been such a defining figure on understanding sustainable development. We've had the privilege to have you on our board. You are the defining person already in the Stockholm conference. You are today the president of ICN and the president of the club of room, which I think is a fantastic institution that so early pointed at the challenges humanity is facing and today is thriving on a new wave of intellectual thinking and innovative guidance under your leadership. And also the founding president of development alternatives and rooted so much in the local predicament of communities, but still acting on the global level. You've taught me just recently two new words. I'm sure you'll hopefully share them with the audience here that we are suffering from this enormous collision between affluency and povititis, which I snatched from you and I use it all the time. And you're not only a guidance to true policy change and development, you're an inspiration to all of us. So Aschok Koshla, equity in empowerment, the missing variables in sustainability equation. It's an enormous privilege to have you as our second Gordon Goodman lecture and the floor is yours and a warm welcome to Aschok. Thank you. Thank you, Johan. You know, I first met Gordon 1976 or so, maybe even earlier, when I visited him in his little office in Chelsea College and it was instant long-term friendship. In fact, I think in a sense we became each other's family. Didn't really have to meet very often, but we're really so close in not only the way we thought, but in the way we wanted to bring about a change in the world. That we were sort of alter egos and whenever I ran into a need for a new idea, I could easily call him up and continue a conversation that had stopped a year or two earlier. I am so grateful to you, Margaret and Kate, that you could come. Last I visited Margaret and Gordon about a few months before he passed away. And it was because I needed his help. Mikhail Gorbachev had asked me to co-chair a process to look at why it is that so many valid and valuable scientific findings get completely ignored by the public and decision makers. And I couldn't think of anyone else I could tap to get deep ideas about. I was in Gordon and I made a specific journey to Cambridge and spent a whole day with him and he was as always so generous with his thoughts. And afterwards when I went back he went to the trouble of finding old papers of his and bringing in new ideas that we hadn't managed to get through and send them for use in this process. Gordon was really influential. He was an institution builder. He was, as Johann says, a firm believer in science and what it has to do. And in the scientist and what he or she has to do. And I think I feel so nostalgic about every moment I spent with Gordon that I'm not going to go into that detail now. But I will tell you one little story. When I was in the UN in the late 70s, I had a terrific, very privileged job and I must admit it was real, real ego trip. But it wasn't what I wanted to do in life. That's not what my parents had spent all their money giving me an extraordinary education to become just a UN bureaucrat. So I was very uncomfortable and I wanted to come home to India. And I shared my thoughts with Gordon about what I would do. And Gordon said, wow, this is really something that needs to be done. What I wanted to do was to make sustainable development into a good business. I wanted to go back to India and set up what was then, didn't have a name. Now it's called social enterprise. But it was basically to combine social objectives with good business practices. Make money, doing it, and therefore be able to do it on a much larger scale. That was the basic idea. It wasn't really something that was considered wise. I went to Peter Drucker, the management guru, and he said, no, no, no. You either make money or you do good, you can't do the two together. That was really a guest management wisdom. Gordon, on the other hand, said, this is the solution to what we've all been working for. So he encouraged me, he encouraged me so much that in this very room in 1980, which is now what, 30 years ago, almost to the day, he organized a massive event, a gala dinner with the Royal Swedish Academy, for me to present my ideas. And it was actually the launching of what I do at the moment in India, which is an organization called Development Alternatives, in this room 30 years ago. So I was particularly touched when I was invited to come here today, because it's not simply a matter of a tribute. It was really a very central part of my life that Gordon fulfilled. And I won't belabor the point simply because I think many of you knew Gordon and how precious and how important he was in our lives. He seemed to be in some ways able to convey that whoever he was talking to was the most important person in his life. So I always felt that way, and I have to tell you that it's a great privilege to be here today. I have a very, very complicated story to tell you, and I'm going to try and do it within a reasonable amount of time. But that means I have to talk fast. If I do talk too fast, please, if anybody wants to slow me down, just raise your hand. But it's almost impossible to make the case that I'm going to try and make today without going through the logic of it. And if that logic isn't going to stick, then I won't be able to make the kind of case that I need to make the next 20 years different. I was here, indeed, at the Stockholm Conference. I was a young person, just appointed by Mrs. Gandhi as the head of the Office of Environment in the Government of India. I wrote some of her speeches and she polished them up in a way that no one else could, and she, as you may recall, was the only two heads of government who was at Stockholm in 1972. In that conference, no government leader descended to come to a conference on the environment other than Olaf Palmy, because he was the host, and Mrs. Gandhi, because she wanted to explain to the world that environment is something much bigger and much more important than simply pollution and acid rain and a few other things. And it was she at that particular conference who actually, in a sense, launched the idea of sustainable development by the phrase poverty is the biggest polluter of all. Nobody really thought about these things, and just by getting that little phrase into the dialogue, she was able basically to convert the whole conversation into something completely different. And with it, the last 40 years, 38 years of a whole different way of trying to do it. Now, the fact that the world hasn't been able to carry that message into action is another issue, and that's why I'm here. But basically, that's what sustainable development was about. I'm going to make a case today that we have made good progress in incorporating the environmental issues, the so-called environmental issues, whatever way you want to define them, into the concept of sustainable development. But we've been very slow in bringing in the human, social, the other equity issues that are equally, and maybe even more important for the survival of humankind, at least of civilization. And maybe even life on the planet. Now, don't get me wrong, the planet will be here whether we, whatever we do. Maybe the cockroaches will too, but human beings are going to have a hard time if we don't change our ways. And part of the change, one half of it, we haven't even started to work on. Actually, it's the easier part, and that's what makes it very interesting. So we live on one Earth, and we've got these huge things happening. One of the amazing things is that 15, 20 years ago, as the resilience center has just shown, some of these things weren't even known. People didn't even think about them. And today they are the stuff of big headlines, climate change, peak oil, water, and food security, massive loss of species. Some scientists say that we're in the sixth extinction. There's more loss and disappearance of species going on right now than there was at the time the dinosaurs died. Population growth, financial instability. These are a whole bunch of things, all of them happening all of a sudden, all at the same time. And we poor human beings have societies that couldn't even deal with one, let alone all these put together. And we've got to now look. Look at what we are going to have to do. Our world is in trouble. The climate is changing and the temperatures are rising. The sea levels are rising, forest fires are rising. The glaciers all over the world, Greenland, Alps, Himalayas, disappearing. This is, don't forget, this is just 10 years. And this is three years. That's 13 years between 1992 and 2005. The fossil fuels are peaking and now there's good reason to believe that we are now already over the hill. Species, this is a rosy periwinkle, the only known source of cure for childhood leukemia. Down to a few hectares in Madagascar. How long we're going to have it? We don't know. But all we do know is that if you don't have it, a lot of kids are going to die unnecessarily. So every day we're losing forests and species and arable land. This is 20 years in Southeast Asia. The green is the forests. Pretty dramatic, huh? Fisheries, some fisheries like Godfishery completely collapsed. In another three or four years, the bluefin tuna will have gone. And this is in spite of the fact that we know. We know what we have to do. We know how dangerous it is and we have the solutions and still it's happening. Droughts, half a billion people. In 32 years, the amount of very dry land is gone from 15% to 30%. We're increasing our deserts at the rate of 60,000 square kilometers a year. Incidentally, this is a piece of land that's very close to where I work. My day job is working in the field in India. This is in Central India. And 60 years ago, the Maharaja of Datya of that little town over there wrote in his diary that he went out with the Duke and Duchess of Westminster for a tiger shoot in this forest. And he came back disappointed to have tea instead because they couldn't get into the forest. It was so thick. It's now the same forest. You know, there's a lot of problems in this world and this poor guy is also having his problems. So we've got really to understand that. It's not Mr. Nice guy anymore. We've got really some stuff to do. Part of it is because of greed and part of it perhaps is also because of need, but we have an unsustainable world. And my concern is that while we've done a lot of work, including my own organization, including the Stockholm Environment Institute, including the whole world, done a lot of work on those things on the left, very little has been done on these issues. And we don't even have any data. And you can't measure something. You can't do much about it. This is a famous diagram from the Resilience Center from the Resilience Alliance, which is published as you all know because this comes right from here. From I'm speaking from the mecca of this diagram. And it just shows that we got problem poverty and affluence. We got problems of ecosystem and species and habitat loss. We've got also all those problems about climate, which is one of the single most important issues. But I don't want to tell you that although it's a millennial, a big historically one of the greatest threats to everything with value. Some of the other things may get us first. Like you remember what Napoleon said about the bells when he was marching towards Russia through parts of southern Russia. And every time they would pass a town, the bells would ring. Well, once he came to a town where the bells didn't ring, so he called the headman and said, why is your town the only one that the bells don't ring in? And he said, well, we've got seven problems. And your majesty, we can't really deal with this because we've got so many problems. He said, all right, tell me what's the first one? He said, the bells are broken. He said, I don't need to hear the rest. You know, it's all right. The bells are broken with the climate change. But there are other six or seven bells that are going to get us. Food security being one, water security being another. Maybe well before the sea level rises. So we have to now just essentially accept the fact that we've goofed up. We've adopted ways of progressing through lives. Which do not leave us very much room for maneuver and the money is running out. The world is in high fever. And Johan is right. I call it afluenza. This is one kind of a fever. A fever that seems to lead to a very good life. It's one of those illnesses that seems to be actually giving you a good feeling. And 25% of the world, that's pretty well. Thank you. Here is a family in South Carolina somewhere. Spent $342 a week on food. And look at the amount of food they eat, this is for people. You know, it's a good thing they waste about one third of it because otherwise they would be even more obese. And that's another kind of a disease that you get. But we've really messed up the whole countryside. According to the World Bank, these are World Bank figures. Half a million people every year die in China and India from outdoor air pollution, from factories, from various activities, traffic, so on. And we're poisoning the land, trying to grow more food because of people, more people, more meat, more everything. Maybe 30 or 40 of the nations of this world are going to disappear once the sea level rises another couple of meters. And then we have the other fever. It's not as though we have one terminal disease, we've got two terminal diseases at the same time. Povatitis. And there are a lot of people, 75% of the world lives like this. You see that lady over there, this woman, her whole, all her belongings are in that picture. That's the picture I took, again, near where I showed you the other one, in the central part of India. I would say the whole of the world is in that picture. Now what is she going to do to bring up children who are going to face the complexities of what we've been looking at? And they spend three or four hours a day collecting fuel wood, getting water. These women are one, three or four women out of the 1.3 billion, who, according to the UN, don't have clean drinking water. Actually, there's a little sleight of hand here because they don't like to make it sound as if they've been doing no work. But the definition of not having clean drinking water by the World Health Organization, no less, is you don't have clean drinking water if there is no point of clean drinking water within one mile of your house. So you can imagine, at night, when you get up for thirsty and you get up for a glass of water, you walk 1.6 kilometers, get a glass, come back, you kind of just having clean drinking water. It's not the way you and I would define it, but that's how you get the 1.3 billion. If you were to define it like we do, it'd be probably close to 3 billion people who do not have clean drinking water. And here's a family in Chad. They spent $1.37 on a week's for the amount of food, and that doesn't include the amount of water that they have to do. And that's the amount of food they've got. And here is a typical little future citizens of the world, people to whom your heart has to go out, because they didn't do anything to deserve this. That area that I showed you, the stumps, the desert, there's a district there called Tikumgar. It's a district I work in a lot, and its official population is 1.2 million people. At no time in the last seven years has there been more than 500, 600,000 people in the area, because they had to migrate, eco-refugees. They go and live in the slums of Bhopal or Delhi or Kanpur, eating out a little living, because there's no water and food in this place. It's gone. And the hockey stick, the hockey stick of population growth. Almost all this population growth has taken place in the last 100, 120 years. This is the red ones are the ones that have people who largely live under $2 per day on an average. And the eco footprint, the ecological footprint, you will notice, is also among the rich countries, Japan, Europe, North America, but it's also in the poor countries. Isn't that interesting? According to this map, the ecological footprint isn't just because of affluence, it can also come because of poverty. Overtitis is a disease that has an impact we didn't think of. You know, it's politically not very correct to go around saying the poor damaged the environment. That's not something you like to say. But out of the exigencies of survival, they do have to dig out the little plants by their roots if they're going to cook. They're going to have to eat the seed corn if they're going to feed their babies some food. I've talked to mothers who knew perfectly well what they were doing to the ecology around them. They said, what do I do? So it doesn't matter whether you're extremely rich or you're extremely poor, you have an impact. You have a very negative impact. And these two diseases, affluence and poverty, these are really, as Johann said, in collision course, we don't know which one will get us first, but they are terminal, that's for sure. And unless we excise them fast, they're going to get all of us. You can't say that I'm rich, therefore I'm protected. They're going to get the rich, they're going to get the poor. This is a very simple equation, and I'm not going to get into this. It was simply the fact that I'm speaking at a science academy, so I had to have an equation. But it's an old, famous one. It's original one was called the Ehrlich equation, and then it became a Kaia identity, and this is actually done by my son, so I call it the EarthSafe identity since it's named after his company. But basically what we're talking about is that in order to understand our impact on the Earth, on Mother Earth, you have to have an understanding of how much energy using, how many services of that energy you're getting, how many kinds of things that happen to your population, to resources, and so on. But above all, you also have to take account of the fact that it depends on the population. Now this is why Ehrlich in the 1980s had invented it because he was the man who wrote the book, Population Bomb. He had a very negative view of the third world producing large numbers of babies. But it's nobody's interest to have a large population when the resources of a planet are pretty finite. So getting away from the politics of it and the nuances of it and getting away from all the negative motivations, if you like, biases, if you like, the fact of the matter is this isn't the interest of everyone to bring about conditions where people like to have small families. Because we got here over the last 150 years, 120 years because people, the death rate of all societies fell dramatically and the birth rate didn't follow down in poor countries. And I'm gonna show you why in a little while, but it's very important to understand that we need to quantify things. Now we've done this, we've done that with things like climate change and we're doing that with even biodiversity and a lot of other things, but we have not done that adequately with the issues of social impact. This is a second picture I've taken from the paper that the Resilience Alliance put together. It's a very dramatic one and as you can see, they use the word planetary boundaries for a variety of reasons which I think are very justifiable. And for them, there are nine planetary boundaries, three, three, three, climate change, ozone, aerosols, ocean acidification and so on, rate of biodiversity loss, nitrogen and phosphorus. Some of them very dramatically staring us in the face, some of them a little bit further down the road. The primary stakeholders, the people who worry about these nine boundaries are what I would call biosphere people, people who live off the resources of the biosphere who can draw from any part of the world on things that they need. When they wanna make a little computer, they can get rare earth metals from China, they can get stuff from Chile, they can get stuff from South Africa, put it all together and they got a nice computer. These are biosphere people, people who can draw on the resources of the entire planet. Unfortunately, there are, there are big disparities in our world. And this is called the champagne glass income distribution that UN produced at a time when, in fact, Anders Wieckmann was in UNDP. And it shows that 20% of the people in the world hijack about 85, 90% of the wealth and income and the rest get there 5%, 7%. And that gap between the top and the bottom is growing. Now, I'm talking about the biosphere people here. These are the people who got the affluenza, the people who are dying of a disease that basically thought was terrific because it connected them up to the world. But I'm also talking, and you'll see there's an overlap there, of people who are dying of poverty. These are people whom we might call ecosystem people. They don't have access to anything beyond their village or a little bit beyond. They can only live off the resources that Mother Earth provides right there. And they are the people who we also have to worry about. Partly because of what Mrs. Gandhi said at Stockholm, partly because of what Mrs. Brunton and a lot of other people did later on, it was pretty clear by the early 80s that sustainability meant having economic, economic efficiency, economic development. Growth by and large is not a nice word in this business for a variety of reasons. Social and environmental. You needed these three things. These are the three legs on which the tripod of sustainability rests. And if any of them is weak, it falls down. It's a tripod. So we've been spending a lot of time in the last 15, 20 years on this leg. This leg was already so strong that we had to make up for it. And this is where we've been concentrating. This leg doesn't even exist really at the moment. So I'm now looking at the ecosystem people. What do they feel? These are the other stakeholders, the two thirds of the world that sort of got forgotten. The ones that academics and newspaper media and all the other people don't often think about. Now their boundaries are kind of different. Their boundaries are poverty and hunger and unemployment and illiteracy and displacement and alienation and indeed violence and terrorism. These are their concerns. These are their problems and sometimes they think these are their solutions. There's nobody giving the slightest thought. There's not a single number you will find on the whole web that relates one to the other in this one. It's totally different from the other boundaries. And that's why we're in trouble because we're so single-minded about our problem we forgot that other people's problems become our problem too. Societal boundaries. These are not just planetary. They concern everybody and every human being. Unfortunately, I believe that today's development strategies will not solve either poverty or ecological security. They're not capable of delivering either. There's more than 100 million families around the world looking for new homes. This is a typical kitchen in a third world. 1.5 million women, young women die prematurely every year because of indoor air pollution. That's WHO, not my figure. So half a million men are dying, people, men, women are dying outside air pollution. 1.5 million are dying inside the kitchen. And they have no escape because they've got to cook for their families. There are all these people scrambling for water. This is a typical picture of the third world. And there's a very interesting thing. I've shown this picture for about a year now to people and it was only about three weeks ago that I realized what a dramatic picture this is. If you look very carefully, you will see the inner ring, the people who've actually managed to get to the water are all men. It's a gender issue too. All the women are out here waiting. But they're the ones who needed the water. They can't get to it. So this poor woman, she has to walk, walk, walk all day long. Two billion people, no energy, commercial energy, forget electricity. Two billion people, no toilets. How much does a toilet cost? Multiply two billion people with the number of toilets you need. Surely that's a solvable problem. And think of what it implies. The humanity of it, the indignity of it, all the dangers of it. But apart from that, the public health impact. And it rebounds. None of us is protected. Billions of people need what Mother Nature provides, including jobs, livelihoods, any kind of a job. You don't have it. This is a UNICEF figure. 20 million babies every year born stunted. UNESCO, 1.7 billion illiterate people in the world. And this is what happens. This is why that woman told me. She said, I know that that thing should be green and have trees on it, but what can I do? Either I don't cook or I cut down the trees. Or the other story. The other story is also probably just as common. If I don't cut it, the government officials will. Or the corporations will. So either way, you're dead. This is what our rivers are now beginning to look like. They're only two or three rivers that are perennial left anymore in India. The country with the richest water resources in the world. Why do you think that Marco Polo and Vasco D'Gama and all these people are going to India for? Because the waters, there's no water there. You thought Marco Polo was going to China. He was actually heading for India first, but he lost his way. So this is it. You see, I mean, we're basically now into a massive problem in a world in which we're really all of us in it together and we don't realize it. We're connected all kinds of ways. The climate, the ocean currents, the fish, the whales, everything is connecting us all over the place. Trade, trade is connecting us massively. Waste, look at the waste. It's an unbelievable thing, but they're all over the place. You don't have to go very far and you're connected. Even the United Nations. We have talk connecting us all the time. And this woman who has almost nothing in her life, she has a television. And she knows what other people in the world have. And is it a wonder that her teenage sons then want to know why they don't have it? This is a map of the number of people internally displaced within their countries. None of them is less than a few, half a million and many of them are many much more. In Africa it's five, Sudan is five million, Ethiopia is seven million. You are talking about big numbers of people who got messed around. Here's an interesting one. 1970, the only country in Latin America that had some dengue fever was Columbia and a part of Guatemala. Sorry. In 1980, 10 years later, it had spread through Brazil, through Bolivia and Ecuador. 10 years later, 1990, the whole country except for Chile. Dengue. And if you read the paper yesterday, if you read the Herald Tribune yesterday, it has now reached Florida. There's dengue fever in Florida. We're all connected. You can't get away from each other. See, you're just not in a position to say, no, I'm going to build a fortress and protect myself. You can't. So this is the other wonderful diagram and I think it's really perceptive. It's the same old boundaries that we showed earlier but this one is chronological. It shows when the boundaries started to become either in real life serious boundaries or perceived to be or understood to be. Poverty leads to high fertility, leads to rising population, particularly of poor people. They then have an impact on the degradation of soils and water, on deforestation, on food prices, on diseases and things like CO2 emissions. More people, more CO2. They also lead to all the other social issues. So there's the environmental issues and there's the social issues. It's very simple. I mean, there's not much to argue about there and these are the endemic poverty issues that reduce your resilience at the global scale. Disparity, disparity, this is the afluenza, the extreme wealth, over consumption, particularly of non-renewable resources, of minerals, of metals, of things that are in the ground that Mother Earth put there for us to use wisely. And that leads to pollution and resource depletion and running out of things. On the other hand, extreme poverty, the poverty tightest people, over consumption of another kind of resource, the renewable resources, the forest, the soils, the waters, these are the resources that were replenishable but no longer because they've been stretched beyond their limits. They don't come back within the normal time spans of a human life, so they become non-renewable. The erosion and loss of productivity, the massive stress on the environment. So whether you're extremely rich or you're extremely poor, everybody suffers. And if you reduce disparity, then you start bringing in more and more people, you broaden your purchasing power. So not only does your democracy work better, your political systems work better, but your markets work better because more people have more money. Why do you think that we've got a financial crisis? Got a financial crisis because a few people got all the money and there's a limit to how many iPods they wanna buy or how many lettuces. So the people who want to buy don't have the money. Disparity is totally against the market, extreme disparity. That doesn't mean everybody's gotta be equal, it simply means that everybody has to have the ability to have a decent life. Human security and well-being for all is the result if you have a look at the implications. So reducing disparity is not just an ethical, a moral issue, it's not just an ethical moral issue that we should do the right thing for right old people. It is, but that's not the reason I'm selling it. I'm selling it because it's my survival, the survival of my kids that depend on it. It's a survival issue. So you got to now look at the other boundaries, the marginalization and the hunger, the poverty, the gender and the unemployment. Today, that is the frontier, that's the boundary. How do you create jobs? How do you create livelihoods that give people meaning and dignity in life, purchasing power to buy their basic needs and not to destroy the resource space? So sustainable development is really basically about that, meaning the basic needs of all maintaining the resource space and it means economic efficiency, which we know quite a lot about, ecological security, which we are finding out more and more about, equity and social justice about which we know nothing and empowerment of all which we don't even have any intention of bringing about. But these are all closely linked and frankly you can't have the one without the other. And my case may not be being made solidly enough for you but I'm pretty well convinced that if you want that then you have to have that. They are logical consequences of each other. And that's why we have the triangle. The role of technology, the role of institutions, the role of value systems, these are all big but I think the low hanging fruit, the one that can get us what we need, lies at the easy end, the things that you can do very fast and easy, things like technology for example. How do you reduce the ecological footprint? You need to because today the ecological footprint being about 1.4, 1.45, which means that we're using 40% more resources than the earth is producing sustainably every year. In other words, it doesn't take to be a banker to understand that you're drawing down your balance. At the moment we're drawing it down so fast that by September 20th or so we've already gone into overshoot. Last year I think it was September 22nd that was called overshoot day. After that we were living on borrowed resources, from borrowed from our kids. Because basically by September and each year that is earlier and earlier. This year it probably is September 18. By when you essentially have used up this year's quota. Why are we in this trouble? We all know every one of us knows. We've got the wrong consumption patterns, the wrong production systems, the wrong mindsets, short time horizons. We have expectations of inordinately high financial returns, which is why the financial system is in such a mess. And then you're not even looking at the other goals. Things like basic needs and livelihoods and environmental health. Now that champagne glass will not work. It's all over. You continue with that business as usual. I'd like to show you what it means. These are technically called ecological rucksacks. Rucksacks are the amount of material you use or you move or you displace when you want a particular thing. The rucksack of a glass of water may be something like three or four times as much as the water it contains. Because it needs a lot of water to clean the bottle and make the bottle and everything else. The rucksack for a 20 gram gold ring, which you can see me wearing, is 20 tons. 20 tons of material has been moved in order to make a little 20 gram gold ring. So rucksacks are one way to look at the kind of material damage we're doing to Mother Earth whenever we extract stuff from her. The consumption of materials is so huge that humankind, anthropogenic use of materials, movement of materials, is now approaching geophysical movements. Other than the ocean currents, if you leave the ocean currents out, the amount of solid material that we're moving on in the crust of the earth in our industries and in our exploitation of minerals is comparable to what nature is doing. So you can imagine ecology is gonna hurt somewhere. Developing countries can't be expected to suddenly stop where they are. They hardly have anything as it is. You've seen what sort of conditions they live in. So they need to go up, they need to go up intelligently so they can come down again. The industrial countries are gonna come down rapidly because they're using far, far, far too much. And the total global amount seems to us to want to do this. And there is a United Nations panel, just like the IPCC for climate change, recently been established, which is looking at exactly these sets of issues. And I'm very much hoping that Anders will be working with us on that quite a lot. In 1972, right at the time of the Stockholm Conference, this book came out. It was an explosion. It was kind of a nuclear explosion of the mind, which really in a sense got the environmental movement going. There were a few things that had happened earlier, but this really demonstrated very clearly that you cannot have infinite growth on a finite resource space. Well, any high school student could have told you that, but they used very complicated mathematical models and computers so that people would believe it. But even so, nobody believed it. I'm going to show you this very quickly because it's an important figure. This is a figure from a book that the Club of Rome has called The Fact of Four, written by Ernst von Weiziger. And in his book, he describes different kinds of agriculture. These are the kinds of agriculture we used to have in the old days. Traditional, if you like, extensive farming. When you made your potatoes or your milk or your meat in normal, natural farming ways, and these numbers mean that by putting one calorie of energy in, in the form of a tractor or in the form of a transport and so on, you get 50 calories out, 50 calories of food out. That's sensible. Any activity that you put a little bit of energy in and you get 50 times as much out, it's not bad. But when you go down to your ICA supermarket, you will see things that you're buying, which are over here. Now here, it's the other way around. You're putting 100 calories in to get one calorie of food out. And the bulk of food that we're eating today, especially the out-of-season food, the stuff, the apples that come from Chile or from New Zealand, almost all the junk that you get in supermarkets is over there. And greenhouse vegetables and anything that's not in season locally produced is over there. And that means you're putting in 200, 300, 400 calories in to get one little calorie out. Now that kind of nonsense economics is why we're in trouble. That's why we're in trouble on energy because we've lost all our fuels and that's why we're in trouble with our finances because it doesn't make sense. But that's basically where we've been doing it. So you've got all these types of footprint. Now the interesting part of that is that according to the UN, the UN World Population Projections, there can be all kinds of outcomes. This is where we are. And depending on how many children per woman you have, if you have 2.6, you'll end up with something of the order of 15.5, 16 billion in the year 2100 at the end of the century. If she has 2.1 children, she will end up here in 2100, which is about 11 or 12 billion. And if she has 1.6 below replacement, she will end up with maybe back to five or six. It makes a big difference how many kids you have. Just going from 2.6 to 2.1 to 1.6, you can see what a huge difference it is. So this is pretty critical. Had the governments of the world, had the government of my country, for example, Mr. Nehru and all the people with him, in 1950 decided we're gonna make the lives of every woman in this country good, you would have had a much bigger impact on fertility than these numbers. You wouldn't be 6.6 billion today, you would be maybe maximum three. Had the aid agencies, the CDAS of this world, the USAIDs of this world, et cetera, invested in people in improving their lives, in the education, instead of in big dams and in huge roads and big airports, the outcome would have been totally different. Now that's the past, we can't do much about the past, but we can do something about the future. Unfortunately, all those investments are going in the same direction as they always did. If there are 1.3 billion people who are illiterate in the world, something's wrong. If there are 2 billion people who don't have drinking water, billions of people who don't have enough to eat, there's something wrong. And they're entitled to have more babies. There are many reasons why they have more babies, for old age security, for labor on the farm, for a variety of reasons. And unless you change those reasons, they're gonna have. So this is a really very, very critical issue. People in the South, diplomats and governments don't like to talk about these things because they think it's accusatory about their patterns of development. Yeah, it is, but it's suicidal, too. The North doesn't realize it, but their consumption patterns are making them have, for every baby that is produced in the North, you have the equivalent of 50 babies. It's also a problem. So either way, you have to look at these things much more pragmatically than we've done in the past. So if I were a person living in the North, I would say, can we go on the way we are, business as usual, or should we, can we get to where we want to go from here by some fine tuning here and a little bit of changes there, or do we have to have really fundamental structural change? These are the three choices. If I come from, that's for, say, a Japanese or a European or a Swede, supposing I'm from India or from China or from Brazil. The equivalent question is, do I copycat? Do I copy the Japanese and find my way there because, after all, they're living a decent life. Do I piggyback? Do I take some of the good things from different lessons that I could learn from Europe and North America and elsewhere? Or do I have to throw everything away and start all over again, leapfrog? So either I can copycat or I can piggyback or I can leapfrog. Now, this menagerie that I have is really important for us to understand because it's the root of whether we save the world or not. You notice my color coding. The red ones, the red slides are copycat. And they're red because they're no good. They are the result of pursuing competitiveness. This is what the minister of finance, the prime minister of any country will say, I gotta do this because I gotta compete. Why? So this poor copycat guy has business as usual. It's easy to sell. Everybody buys into it. And you know, you've got yourself the normal stuff. And you've got your agriculture way over on the left-hand side. And within a few years, you find you're importing your food. Every year now, from now on, China and India are gonna be countries that were self-sufficient in food in some phony kind of way because not everybody was being fed very well but are going to be buying more and more food because they're destroying their food production capacity. Soils are going, the micronutrients are going, the water is going, they're going to be in serious trouble. Lester Brown has documented this completely in many, many books. And your resulting income distribution gets even bigger. I mean, what's bigger than a champagne glass? I don't know, whatever. And you're way up there because you've got so much disparity now that the poor have virtually nothing else to do but have families. And your ecological footprint is huge. It goes up and sooner or later, you're going to overshoot and collapse. All over the world, not just the poor, the rich. Everybody's going to overshoot and collapse if we go on with business as usual. And that's probably your best future. These are Stone Age people who, for their space age, for the period of 100 years, just a period of 100 years, had this massive efflorescence of civilization that you and I so much love. And then you're back to Stone Age, except that your weapons are better. They're nuclear tipped. They're maybe both narrows. They may be still, you know, bludgeoned people, but they are high tech. But that's it. Now, the yellow ones, the yellow slides, are about piggyback. This is how you can somehow fine tune your way out of part of the problem. Factor of four, maybe you can do it with housekeeping improvements, better technology, fiscal incentives. This is the factor of four book that I was talking about earlier. And here the agriculture is sort of semi-sensible. It's in the middle. The energy and material efficiencies can come up and you have hypercars and you get better houses and less energy use and you get light bulbs and you change these and you can get even low-energy clothes and things. So this is possible to do. And you can change your bus transport systems, your private transport to public transport. And what happens is you get a slightly more sensible looking champagne glass. Now it's beginning to look more like a wine glass and your fertility comes down. You already have. Now remember, this is without much data. I mean, I don't have the kind of data that the Stockholm Resilience Center has to be able to do with what their stuff is. So I need help. I mean, I've got to find ways in which to put numbers into these things. But the numbers that I have are pretty solid in a ballpark sense. Piggyback. Piggyback may just be able to continue to improve for a longer time. It may manage to avoid overshoot and collapse. May, may not, I don't know. But it's less bad. As my colleague Gunther Pauley says, you know, what's so great about less bad? If a kid says, I'm going to start, I'm really going to be good, I'm going to start from tomorrow stealing less. Is that, is that all right? It's less bad. We're less polluting, we're less, but we're leaving behind a planet that's unlivable anyway. Less bad is not good enough for any of us in this room, I hope. Pursuit of national happiness. Now, we're not talking about GDP growth, isn't that? We're talking about switching out of the present rat race. It depends on having leapfrog, structural changes. At least a factor of 10 reduction in material and energy use. Designing your whole system to depend on completely different. Today, the prime minister of India, God bless his soul, probably the best head of state in the world today, in terms of virtually everything, intellect, honesty and everything else. But he's concerned about the stock market, frankly. He's concerned about how much investment's going to come in to India. I don't think he's worried about what's going to be the future of that world. He will do that if he gets votes, and this time, in this particular last election, he showed more interest in it. And it's not meant to be a personal comment, it's simply that the leaders of the third world, the leaders of all the world, are really not interested in what happens to this girl. But she's the central fact of our lives. She's what all of governance and all of development are all about. But nobody really gives much damn about that. So you can do solar, and this is a nice Spanish solar thermal, you can switch to LEDs, you can change your technologies. This one is a real life story, 1997 in New York City. The city fathers invited tenders, and they got tenders for their water treatment plant. Halliburton and all these big companies, put in tenders, and the least one was 6.5 billion. 6.5 billion capital and 300 million operational every year. And then a bunch of people like Matt's and other people, ecologists and NGOs and professors, came along and said, no, no, no, that's not a water treatment plant. This is a water treatment plant. Go up into the cat scales, clean up the headwaters, and you will get it for one-tenth the cost and no running costs. And that's exactly what happened. They got it for 0.7 billion dollars and zero. And in fact, within four years, the tourist value of this area had gone so much up that even that 0.7 billion was recovered. So it cost them nothing. Now that is not just less bad. That's doing a lot more with nothing. And I think we now have to really completely rethink our approaches to technologies. Now, if you'll permit me, I will just tell you what Gordon Goodman launched me into, what he got, the kind of trouble he got me into when I came to give my speech here 30 years ago. With, as part of, as a result of that speech, I raised some money, I went home to India, said goodbye to the UN, and I started a company called Development Alternatives, a social enterprise. It was a not-for-profit, but it was a business. This is the National University of India. It's called Nehru University. Naturally, it's either a Gandhi or a Nehru. So this one is Nehru. And this one is big. It's a macho statement. India has arrived. It's stone and cement and steel and concrete. And it's a good education. But we didn't see how you could house one billion people in that kind of technology. So we completely rejected the whole notion of building like that and built our headquarters with no steel, no cement, no bricks, and no wood. Just clay. Just, sorry, not clay, just mud. Mud and lime. No air conditioner in a city that today is 45 degrees centigrade. This building had no air conditioner and we had 150 people working comfortably, creatively. And you'll see the kind of creativity that came out of it in a second. But with this kind of technology, it is possible to see housing the 40 million people that government of India says need new houses. There's no way you could do that with that. This is our new building. I think it's the greenest building in the world but it's certainly the greenest building east of Suez. And this building basically is partly recycled materials from earlier buildings. But it uses only our own technologies that my organization developed. And it's basically about one third the use of materials, energy, et cetera, that a normal building like the one next to it would use. Our primary work in our organization, this is why Gordon and I really loved each other because he was heavily into cook stoves, and so was I. For both of us, the central fact of the most important person in the third world, which is the girl I showed you, is how to get water and cooking. And we figured those were the two things we would wanna do first. So we became the kings of cook stoves. We've sold literally tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions of these of different kinds. We developed a whole new technology for construction called compressed earth, which has no need to be fired so you save the entire baking energy. This is the Indira Gandhi National Center for the Arts. You can see it's right in the middle of Delhi. It's next to the Meridian Hotel. And this is built literally out of the ground, all local materials. In 1987, it was built as an exhibition center temporarily. The reason I got permission to do this was that they were making a tent and I said I'd do it cheaper than the tent. So we did it, 120 days. But they fell in love with it and it's still there. So if you ever come to Delhi, you can see it. And every time there's an earthquake, I have sleepless nights because it was meant to be only for six months. But it's still there and it's still hanging in there. And it's a very nice building in which more than 100 major national exhibitions have taken place with prime ministers and visiting dignitaries and so on. So this is an important statement that you can do things that are not just for the poor, that have meaning elsewhere. This is a whole new technology for making roofs. This woman owns an enterprise, creates five jobs and with an investment of 3,000 euros, she's able to make very good money, pay decent wages and produce a very much needed building material. It's a nice material, as you can see. I mean, this is something even middle-class people like to use. These are fire bricks. This is a totally new technology that reduces the energy used by about 55%, 50% carbon dioxide. The World Bank gave us the first CDM project in the world, in fact, for this technology. These are looms. These are looms that are very high tech, but they're hand looms. They don't use electricity. And that woman's earnings from being on a traditional loom to our new loom went up by a factor of four overnight. She needed eight hours of retraining and she was earning four times as much money. These women are making handmade recycled paper, which is now sold all over the world. These are weeds that came in 100 years ago from Costa Rica. Weeds that are real nuisance. In Hindi, we call them besharam, which means shameless because the more you cut them, the more they grow. In fact, across the border, my friends in Pakistan tell me they're called politician, probably for the same reason. They are converted by local labor into fuel, which is gasified in a very high tech machine, which we developed with the top Indian science university. And it creates electricity, which is cheaper than the grid. We develop wastelands with very, very little cost by simple but very scientific methods, converting them into, what was that, about a year into the beginnings of a forest. And we do organic and small dams. These are our answers to the big dams, but the returns on investment on one of those is like 2,000%. It completely changes the whole economics of the place, going from zero one crop a year to three crops a year and completely changes the dynamics of the water systems. So these are the kinds of things we do. And in leapfrog, your agriculture has to go back to the days when it made sense. These are women who are learning from a new program we developed. My colleagues developed a program which is truly like magic. In 30 days, it teaches a woman or anybody how to read and write. Read a newspaper at about 15 words a minute, write a poem, and in 30 days, she can not only read and write, but she'll never forget it because it uses very interesting high tech learning memory hooks. And it is so interesting that the combined failure plus dropout rate in this course is less than 3%. It's been quite amazing and it works like this. This is a polio stricken girl who became a teacher. First she learned how to read and write and then she started teaching the whole village how to read and write. These are some of the women that we taught. We got a million dollars from the UK government and we taught these women to read. So we do these kinds of things and for us, that champagne glass is gone. It's a beer glass. It's a glass of water for us. We've got to really change things. And now you can really start thinking about a future that's better for everyone. And a management of the population that makes sense. So I took you through all this because we're now not talking about less bad. We're talking about a general improvement in the lives of everyone. Of course, this is not all. There are possibilities for the horse jump to go to factors 10, factor 20, factor 50. Then you have to go to nature. This is my work with Anders and with Gunther Paoli and in Zeri and I'm just going to show you something that would have appealed to Gandhi and would have appealed very much to Saint Francis of Assisi because it is doing something that's good for humanity and it's good for Mother Earth at the same time. It brings the five kingdoms of nature together. In nature, there is no waste. In nature, everything is tailored to it. And the technologies of nature have had five billion years of evolution. I mean, the ones that didn't work were we called long, long, long time ago. They're disruptive technologies. These are technologies and my colleague and I should show it to you because I brought it especially for showing you. We've just produced a book called The Blue Economy. This book has these hundred technologies which can be the basis of a totally new form of economy. We call it The Blue Economy because it's sort of beyond the green economy. And these technologies can regenerate a savanna or desert into a tropical rainforest. They can learn from nature on how this zebra is naturally air conditioned. That's why it has stripes. As you can see, the moths have figured that out. And you can learn from the termites and you can build buildings that are much lower in energy and material use. You can learn from this desert beetle in the Sahara which can go at 30 kilometers an hour under the sand because it has no friction. So you can develop whole new ways of making ball bearings. These are red seaweeds that repel bacteria. So you can have a whole new form of anti-bacterial systems. This is learning from the whale which has a huge heart, how to make a pacemaker that is attached to your chest without invasive surgery. And an EKG, an electrocardiogram that transmits to your cell phone, that transmits to your doctor and can monitor it all day long with no battery, uses the body heat to run. So we're talking about a whole new way of doing things. These are ways in which you can build your vaccines that don't need refrigeration, water systems. This is a really interesting one. This is a beetle from the Namibian Desert. This beetle and this cactus called the Welwici Amirabilis, these two both contains water from the air. I don't know how many of you knew this, but there's more water in the atmosphere than there is in all the rivers and lakes of the world, surface fresh water. And these beetles can have shown us very, very clever beetle. This beetle has these models. Can you see the little models on his back? Well, the top end of that little hill is hydrophobic. It doesn't like water, it's positively charged. The valleys are hydrophilic, they collect the water and the whole water then just forms into droplets and the local Kalahari Bushmen can come and drink all the water they want. That's the cactus. So there are all kinds of new technologies that we want. My one of my favorites, if I could get a rich high net worth person to finance it is the one that is the most ecological and that's the airship, because I think for Africa, India, Latin America, this is the future of transport. There's virtually no other way that we will be able to move goods and people, except for this. Now there's not much research to be done because everybody's done it. I've been spending a lot of time with Count von Zeppelin the fourth or whatever number he is. Technology exists, but it has to be adapted to conditions in the third world. So there you are. The whole of this thing was to really tell you that we have much more complex things to do than just looking at even those nitrogen phosphorcycles or the acidification of the oceans, which are hugely threatening. But there are going to be nowhere near kinds of threats that some of these things. My final point about this whole evening, this whole morning is that improving the lives of people has a double whammy. Not only are they entitled to it, not only is every single human being on this planet entitled to a decent life, but if you do improve their lives, you get a lot of side impacts, side benefits. You see these maps, these maps are, the size of the country is proportional to the size of that parameter. So this is a map of the world, according to how many girls are not in primary school. This is a map of the girls not at secondary school. This is a map of illiterate young women. And you see they're almost pretty well similar, aren't they? I mean, there's big India, there's a fairly big China. There's a large Africa and there's almost nothing in Europe or North America. Now if you look at the number of births a woman produces, that's the same map, there's virtually no difference. You keep the girls ignorant, you get lots of babies. That's what the map says. Now what the cause and so on, we can figure out, we can talk about, but that's just too strong a correlation to ignore. And if you can teach these little girls how to take care of themselves, to get a decent education, to become entrepreneurs, the whole thing changes. And now you can see that this is urban slums, infant mortality, human poverty, everything is correlated. And if you get the good things, they're counter correlated. This is from World Bank data. You can see except for Israel, Oman and a couple of outliers, almost everything to what a statistician will say is almost certain behavior. There's a correlation between fertility on the vertical axis and GDP on horizontal axis. The better off you are, the fewer kids you're gonna have. The better off you are, you have lights, you have entertainment, you have television, you can go to school, you can get jobs. A girl doesn't have to get married to, against her wishes, to someone until she's ready. She goes to school, she has other options. That makes a huge difference. I've done all the calculations, but you remember this paper unit of mine that was set up in 1987 with a grant from NORAD from the next-door neighboring country. And they gave us enough money to set up a paper unit which had 25 women. Now we were very proud of this technology we had developed. So I told the HR people, you please interview 200 women from the local villages. This is really out in a remote area. And take only the 25 bottom ones, the ones that really need the job, the battered ones, the ones who are desperate. Take those and let's see what happens. So they did. We got people who nobody would ever employ. 25 of them, and when I was going to Copenhagen for the climate change meeting in December, I sent two demographers out there to get the data on these women. 23 out of the 25 were still there. One had died, one had got married and gone off somewhere else. So on an average, we had 21 years, 24 women. In other words, we had 500 women years of experience all in childbearing age. We had maternity records in the factory and we had their interviews, every one of them. And we found that they'd had two babies in the entire period, only. The whole period, there were two births in the factory. We did a control group, went to see their sisters, cousins, same age, same caste, same villages, and there were at least 25. We know that some were underreported, but we know of 25, but still a factor of 12 down, simply by giving them a job. You give a woman a job, there is no incentive to have babies. It's a big difference, it's a good indicator of her feeling about well, her health, her well-being, and her control over her life. She's able to say to her mother-in-law, no, I don't want any more kids, or to her husband for that matter. And you can see that if you do the modeling, which we did, mathematical modeling, and we looked at all the things that happened when you have more energy, more electricity, you have television, television's a pretty good contraceptive, by the way, so is lights. And all the way through, you get a huge difference. In fact, according to our calculations, by the year 2050, 40 years from now, if we were to introduce these kinds of measures, make it possible for women who want to work to work and be paid properly, could be a difference of two to three billion people on this planet. That's a very big difference. And you see, interesting part of it is that we did the assumptions. So one birth avoided, we're only counting is about $1,000, $1,200, of carbon emissions reduced. But if you do that, your savings, accumulated over the next 30, 40 years, come to a saving of about 3,600. But what is really dramatic is this. If you do carbon capture and sequestration, which everybody's talking about in every UN meeting, it costs about $120 to $150 per ton of carbon saved. Probably much more than that, but that's what Kennedy School says. If you do energy efficiency in industries, you can get $25 to $50 cost for one ton of carbon saved. Forests are a little better, but a girl's school is only $6. You spend, make a school for girls, the impact will be to reduce a ton of carbon for $678. If you give her a job, you actually make money. You make money while you're saving carbon. Now, how do we sell these incentives? So these are the kinds of figures. If you could get just a little bit of change in the way we invest our development money, whether it's internal from our own countries or internationally, you can have huge savings in the number of people and in the number. And I'm not suggesting that this lets the north off the hook. They've got to do the bulk of the work has to be done by reducing consumption of fossil fuels. I'm only talking about one or two wedges, maybe 10% or 15% of what's needed. But then the South can proudly say, we're doing our bit, why don't you do yours? Because we will be doing our bit. So we're not talking about the whole responsibility falling on the South. That's neither justifiable nor possible, but at least it's share it can do. And rather than less bad or better, these are the kinds of approaches for the best. I believe that we've really now got to go into the next 20 years looking at these boundaries. These are the boundaries that are going to actually make life miserable for large numbers of people. The other day I was in a meeting with Ernst von Weiziger in the General Assembly in New York a week ago. And somebody asked, do you think it's too late already? Yeah, for three billion people in this world, it's been too late already for a long, long time. Many of them died because of hunger. If that's not too late, then what is? But for the rest of us, it's probably we just got enough time to turn the tanker around a little bit. And that's basically what I wanted to share with you and thanks for your patience. Well, Ashok, it simply leaves you speechless, I think. It hits you right deep into the stomach, but also clicks on every part of your intellectual capacity and then to move from this integrated analysis of the predicament into so much hope and light in the tunnel, I think is formidable. Time is actually up, you used it very well, but we agreed, for those of you who have to leave, please do, but let's allow for one or two comments, reflections, questions before we need to round off. I think this whole discussion is so fundamental for the world future that it deserves some remarks or opening for questions to you as well, Ashok. So floor open for anyone who want to pick up any thread of this very, very comprehensive story. Yes, please. I'm Kola Yin. It has been a very inspiring lecture and then we were on to think about it when we go home and then we forget lots of things. So can we read anywhere in the net? Can you please tell us where we can read it again? It's on my website and I will give it to them. Yes, and while Rob is just pointing out that we will put it on the SCI website as well, so it's just www.sei.se. Thank you. Any other comments or questions? Yes, please. Lisa, but I can a petition, WSP. I wonder the actors to make these things happen. Of course, the global community, the United Nations and all the institutions, but as I'm from the business sector, what do you see could be the business sector's contribution to achieving this? Thank you. I wanted to come up here, Ashok, and I will give a package to SCI to be on the website. And I have a website and my organizations have to be welcome to look at it. Business sector is possibly the most crucial one. And I really went on and on and I couldn't spend time on that. But for a business executive, for a business person, there's a whole stairway if you like to heaven. And what is business person's heaven? Well, it starts out by making a lot of money and that's the lowest step. They make money, they make profits and they're happy with that. They buy things and yachts and houses and so on. And then they realize that that's not enough. Then they start worrying about a little bit more than that. And they then go to the next step, which is usually good PR. It's putting a spin on what they do. They employ a company to tell the world how great they are and they're looking after their environment and impacts and this and that. Still not enough. Then a few years later, they start worrying about the world that they're gonna leave behind. And then they become a little more interested in charity giving things to their favorite charities, sometimes a soup kitchen, sometimes a temple or in India would be a temple or a clinic or a little school or something. Then that's not enough because they don't see any impact. So they become philanthropists. And philanthropy is something that's much more systematic and it sees your money going into something that has long-term impact. And that's all to the good. But the businessman person who goes beyond what Peter Drucker told me and becomes a social entrepreneur who sees the business that he or she's doing as a way of changing the world and still making a profit, making it commercially viable, that person I think is closer to the top of the rung, getting closer to their heaven, which they wanna get to. And I think the future lies in that kind of a business. If young people want to really, like my son, has decided he's gonna be a social entrepreneur from the beginning. So that gives him a head start. For 50 years, he can do things that most people get a chance to do only for five. Now what happens is that by the time you're into your fourth or fifth rung, you have a teenage daughter who comes to the breakfast table every day with you. And one day she says, she looks very morose, and one day she says, dad, I'm not going to school today. And dad says, why not, darling? I mean, what's wrong with school? And she says, I go to school and they say my father is a criminal. And they make fun of me and they tease me and I'm quite miserable. I don't like to go to school anymore. And he says, what do you mean? I'm not a criminal. Well, they say that you pollute the environment, your projects kill off the tigers, you do this and that. So basically at this point, he has little choice. It's either his daughter or continue to make large amounts of money. In fact, this happened recently to the president of the World Bank. He's now the greatest single champion of the tiger in the wild. This happened to a lot of business people. I know of at least a dozen business people who completely transformed their lives because young people and their families sort of forced them into thinking about what they do. So it depends how we get business people motivated. But if business doesn't do this, if the BP's don't do this and the shells don't do this, we will never be able to solve the problem. And I don't think it's purely by government action. It can't be by regulation. It can be by stringent liability laws. That I think you need. BP would not have been doing what it did if it knew that it was going to have to face a bill of several billion, maybe trillion dollars. I think liability laws are now really needed and the enforcement mechanisms. But that's about all I can say. Thanks, Colin, Rick, Kirober. Thank you for a wonderful exposure of these problems. And also thank you for a very nice question. I couldn't agree more. A number, and in fact, a growing number of businesses are seeing the top of that ladder and they would like to climb. I would just like to add a very often neglected missing component in this. We have mountains of evidence of why this is needed as well as mountains of evidence, so I've far too few people are actually acting in the Afluenza world. But one neglected piece of the puzzle is that for those people who really would like to climb that ladder, they don't know how to do it. They don't know how to move from one paradigm to another. So incompetence is a very often neglected part of the unsustainability problem. And vice versa, if you teach people actually how to do the transition, they get inspired. And competence is an underestimated source of inspiration. Yeah, I think you're right. And I don't really need to answer it except to say that you are sitting next to probably one of the world's best examples of a person in Bo Ekman who has done precisely this, not only in his own life to make that transformation transition to a completely different set of values from what corporate culture must have taught him, but also to do it in a way that thousands, maybe tens of thousands of CEOs around the world have been impacted by that. So Bo is my idol and mentor for exactly what you're talking about. And it's been done very successfully in Sweden. I'm not so sure it's so easy in other places. I couldn't have been easy here. I've seen it in many places. We can talk more. Thank you. Hi, good afternoon. My name is Kamila Hall and I'm actually a Swede living in Singapore. Thank you again, a shock for an amazing speech. I just want to add because I'm a business woman living in Singapore but covering Asia as my market developing and bringing new technologies from Europe, especially Sweden and Northern Europe. I just came from the exhibition down in Genshaping. Sweden is just full of amazing technology that are suitable for this world. But I think it's always a lack of understanding to really understand the needs of the various markets. And that's why I really want to encourage all the Swedes, politicians and business people to go there to understand, to use a shock in his team's expertise because they really know what is needed because we cannot sit here and colleagues and Peter and so left you to think what Indians need. This is what a shock in his team's been doing for more than 30 years. And this is an amazing business opportunities in these times where we have financial crisis in Europe. To really look at India, sorry, and to really look at China and in Southeast Asia, you have so many people that really need something because here in Europe we're quite full. So this is just my comment. Thanks. Please, Anders. Thank you, Ashok, for this wonderful lecture. I have millions of questions, but one I think that is very pertinent in particular since you have been dealing with multilateral and bilateral agencies for quite some time. To make this happen, what would be your advice to the Swedish CDAS of this world and the World Bank and the UN organizations? Because what comes out of your lectures, of course, the experience that most of what they've been trying has not really worked. So what would be the single most important thing for them to rethink? If you're talking about outsiders influencing the patterns of development in a recipient country which could be in Africa or in India or anywhere else, then you have to understand that the money that comes from outside has a DNA. It has a genetic code built into it. And one of the reasons for that is very simple. In almost all countries, Sweden being the least problematic, but in all countries, the public has been sold the idea of giving development assistance on the grounds that it's good for the economy, of the giver. Much of this money will come back in the form of generators bought, experts sent, consultants, machines, et cetera. Also, some of it will come back in the form of goodwill because people learn a little bit about the way we do things, et cetera. Now this is very inimical. This is really the number one cause in my opinion of the failure of development aid. Canada, which is like Sweden, a very generous country, has an unwritten law that 80% of the money must come back to Canada. Now if you're gonna do that, it's going to basically lock you into things that were no relevance to you whatsoever, but because the money came, and so everybody gets a benefit. They go advertising that we've been so much money and you get your rich people, the powerful people in your country get kickbacks and everything else and they also get businesses that they can make more money out of. But the poor and the environment and nature, all of them suffer for it. So the first thing to do is if you're in the business of development assistance, it ought to be for real genuine solution of problems rather than solving your own problem. The second part of it is that as the lady over there said, the idea is learn from the local people what they want and how they solve their problems. The third is that this genetic code I was talking about is very insidious in another way. It brings the model of development, the centralized, the top-down, the automatically is a part of the deal because you're dealing with governments, government to government and it's hard for you to deal with local small enterprises or whatever. The solutions to both the energy problem and the development problem are all local. Those solutions are in small local enterprises and those are not amenable to big transfers of money. So we've got a lot of things that need to be changed. The World Bank has no chance of understanding all this but the others, perhaps, maybe UNDP could, maybe we should try to use Rio Plus 20 for making this the central issue. If you're going to have transactions in the name of development, then those ought to be designed in a way that produces sustainable development which has certain characteristics we all know but that's not what you get from external assistance. Okay, thank you, Ashok. Thanks, dear friends. A clap again for this fabulous talk. And I think I dare say, Margaret, that if Gordon would have been with us today, he would have been actively engaged in the discussions. He would have felt that this was truly in his spirit of minds to combine the biosphere stakeholder with the ecosystem stakeholders in the social, ecological, multiple whammies facing humanity and think in terms not only in transformative sense but also think very much in practical sense. What can we do on the ground for the people that really needs immediate steps towards sustainable development? So I think we've truly had our second Gordon Goodman lecture in the spirit and the legacy of Gordon Goodman himself and I'd like to thank you very much for participating and of course Ashok for inspiring us. This is a lecture which should be, I guess compulsory for every world leader and we'll certainly do everything we can from the CI side to spread the message and continue our hard work which is committed to do exactly this, science-based hard work to change the lives of people and societies towards sustainable development and we're all into that journey together. So again, thank you very much and thanks everyone. So this Gordon Goodman lecture closed for this time. See you next year. Bye. Thank you.