 Distinguished participants and esteemed guest speakers, Mr. Zavazava, Mr. Fredes Lucio. It's my pleasure as co-chair of the Regional Forum for Sustainable Development to launch this roundtable on SDGs 9 and 17. As you know, these two SDGs will discuss the importance of partnerships for inclusive and sustainable digital transformation. Digital transformation as well as information and communication technologies in general are critical to accomplishing the sustainable development goals. Of the 17 SDGs and 169 targets, hardly any are detached or completely detached from the impact and from the potential of digital technology. Digital technologies foster economies worldwide. They shape global societies. In particular, collection, processing and visualization of data are key in measuring the progress made in implementing the SDGs. They are key to promote evidence-based political decisions. My own country, Switzerland, for example, has taken such an approach in digitalizing its voluntary national review via our process through a tailor-made tool called SDG 2030. In a more general comment, I would say that the COVID-19 pandemic has stressed the potential of digitalization in the health sector and in general. We should build on the learnings. We should carry success forward as we continue to build our societies back better. However, while digital transformation offers a hand in simplifying processes, facilitating the national and international comparability of data and accelerating important developments, however, we need to drastically improve availability of SDG data worldwide. We need to continue investing in data and statistic systems and we need to find common ground in regulating the use of data. Furthermore, we need to ensure that digitalization does not further widen the already existing gaps and aggravate inequalities. The RFSD, the Regional Forum on Sustainable Development, provides an opportunity to jointly reflect on the status of achievements of the SDGs and their targets. With only about seven years left to meet these goals, the RFSD is a moment for decision makers and other stakeholders across sectors to exchange lessons learned, best practices, and look forward-looking policy actions that we need to accelerate progress and close any remaining gaps. Not only does the RFSD serve as a convening platform, but it will also provide a regional contribution to the high-level political forum on sustainable development coming up in July. This year's RFSD is a particular in significance of the Agenda 2030, as it provides an opportunity to contribute to the SDG Summit, which will take place in September 2023. This will be the halfway mark of the 2030 Agenda implementation. Looking ahead, the Summit of the Future that will be held in 2024 will build on the SDG Summit to reaffirm our commitment to the 2030 Agenda and sustainable development as much-needed priority in today's world. These summits, we hope, will boost their partnerships to access global challenges, and I'm thrilled to witness this roundtable, which emphasizes on taking a coordinated and systematic approach in bridging digital development gaps and challenges, given the indispensability of digital technologies in every domain of our life. This roundtable will thus provide very relevant, prove very relevant to those different processes leading towards the summits that I mentioned. I look forward to the discussions, which I'm sure will provide important insights on how to accelerate the implementation of the 2030 Agenda. We need to give this Agenda another push, and I thank you in advance for sharing your views and for the fruitful exchange that we will witness. Thank you so much. Back to you, Chair. Thank you very much for this statement, and we are looking forward to the SDG Summit and also reinforced message on the digital, hopefully with the digital day at the SDG Summit, which will definitely reenergize these efforts, which we are also discussing today. So, dear ladies and gentlemen, now it's my great pleasure to introduce Dr. Kostma Zabazaba, Director of the Telecommunication Development Bureau of the International Telecommunications Union. Okay, I have the floor now. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you very much for inviting us to be part of this discussion. I was at LDC-5 in Doha two weeks ago. Speaker after speaker reinforced the statement of the UN Secretary General that it is digital that is likely to rescue the SDGs. We all agree that in terms of the list of developed countries and also the international community, we are lagging behind in terms of our targets to achieve the 2030 Development Agenda. And with this, I would say, Mr. Ruby and Mr. Lucio, it is a pleasure to share the panel with you and good afternoon. It is my great pleasure to join you here at this PLN in Roundtable. On behalf of ITU, the UN Specialized Agency for Information and Communication Technologies. I want to thank UNECE for putting together this regional forum and the steadfast commitment for sustainable development. ITU is strongly committed to connecting the world and accelerating sustainable digital transformation globally to help achieve the SDGs in this decade of action. And our work evolves around these two SDGs, SDG-9, SDG-17, and of course, the rest of the other SDGs. Over the past decade, the connectivity challenges become more complex and demanding. Bringing everyone online is no longer enough. Meaningful connectivity is now essential for everyone, everywhere, to achieve their full potential in the digital age. Our goal is to see everyone enjoy a safe, satisfying, enriching, productive, and affordable online experience. Development of the digital economy is inextricably linked to the achievement of the SDGs. Digital transformation has to take place across the world society from digitalizing economic sectors, digital public infrastructure, building innovation ecosystems, creating digital government, developing digital public platforms just to name a few. ITU's Telecommunication Development Bureau, through, among others, impactful partnerships actively develops programs that help countries, nature enabling policy and regulator frameworks, build their capabilities in innovation and entrepreneurship, accelerate the impact of their digital ecosystems to ultimately help unlock their digital potential. Let's look at connectivity in the regions in this slide. ITU studies show that in the CIS region, an increase of 10% in fixed broadband penetration would yield an increase in 0.63% in GDP per capita. An increase of 10% in mobile broadband penetration in the Europe region would yield an increase of 2.1% in GDP per capita. But some gaps impacting SDG 9 and SDG 17 targets are evident. Based on our research, Eastern European and Central Asian countries still have a 10% gap in 4G coverage. Last week, I was in India and the Prime Minister launched the 6G vision, while the other countries are struggling. Some are stuck in 2G, others in 3G, and as we can see here, we are discussing about the 4G coverage. About 2% of the population is not covered by mobile networks. 13% and 18% usage gaps in the western and eastern parts of the region respectively also exist. How do we close these regional gaps? We need a new thinking. The focus on SDG 9 and SDG 17 reflects ITU's commanding. In this region, we need connectivity to power digital transformation for sustainable economic development, job creation and world-class educational outcomes. But we also need to develop an ecosystem that nature innovation and entrepreneurship. This is one of the motivations behind the Innovation Entrepreneurship Alliance for Digital Development, which I launched on the 25th of January this year. The Alliance focuses on both demands. The Alliance helps countries use digital transformation to expand national development agendas and build sustainable human and institutional capabilities nationally. The Alliance provides support through a system of digital transformation laboratories, acceleration sender networks and a digital innovation board. It aims to assemble all the pieces needed to kickstart effective and sustainable digital transformation here and globally. We also have a digital investment in partnerships. ITU in close cooperation with the UN Tech Envoy's office established what is popularly known as P2C, which is Partner to Connect, digital coalition. Partner to Connect aims to advance digital development all over the world, but especially in the least developed countries through partnerships and mobilization of pledges. Under the Partner to Connect, as of today, we have received 600 pledges with a value of $30 billion. These have come from about 118 countries out of our 193 countries and we are still receiving and counting the pledges. We will be sharing the Partner to Connect journey at the regional development forums, which we are going to be holding in all the regions. The European Regional Development Forum, for your interest, will kick off. A series will kick off in Timishwara, the second largest city of Romania, and it will take place from 22 to 23 May. You are cordially invited. We can honest from strengthened UN partnerships. Members of the UN Digital Transformation Group for Europe and Central Asia have jointly produced the Digital Development Toolkit, highlighting UN expertise, frameworks, guidelines, capacity-building tools in building sustainable digital development. I am convinced that the toolbox, together with the UN Digital Development Country Profiles, will provide overall digital diagnostics on countries, such as the recently launched one in Bosnia as a governor. Digital transformation matters, and I think we all agree. The co-chair of the 2023 Regional Forum on Sustainable Development, Mr. Ruby, indicated that 2023, the midpoint of the SDG process is pivotal. As we affirm our commitment to the SDGs, engagement is key to help us map how we can move forward. A digital society is a fundamental to the attainment of the sustainable development goals. And with these words, I thank you. Thank you very much, Dr. Zawazawa. Now let us invite Director of the Member Services Digital Development, the world's meteorological organization. The floor is yours. Thank you. Excuse me. Dr. Zawazawa, who I haven't seen for some time, Dr. Ruby, the co-chair of the Regional Forum on Sustainable Development, colleagues, distinguished guests, and ladies and gentlemen, on behalf of the World Meteorological Organization, I'd like to extend our warmest greetings to you all attending this meeting. First of all, having chosen doubly more as the venue for this event. But secondly, for being part of a very important agenda item, which is digital transformation. As we're going to look at opportunities and challenges in achieving digital transformation and eventually sustainable development, I'd really like to link the topic of sustainable development, the topic of digital transformation to what doubly more does, doubly more being the World Meteorological Organization. In his statement, Dr. Zawazawa clearly indicated the importance of digital transformation and the actions which are being taken to achieve this digital transformation. On the part of doubly more, you all know that the Secretary General of the United Nations, Mr. Guterres, on the 23rd of March, 2022, launched a major initiative, the Early Warning for All initiative, in which it is expected that within the next five years, all citizens on the planet will have access to early warning systems. This undertaking will not be possible unless we achieve digital transformation. To a certain extent, we look very much forward to what you as a group are going to come up with to accelerate the targets or the activities towards digital transformation because that will enable us to try and achieve what we set out to do under the Early Warning for All initiative, which, by the way, is expected to sort of reach its summit in 2027. So we've got very limited time to realize this initiative. But more specifically, I'd like to link SDG9 with the capabilities of exploiting weather, water, and climate observations, monitoring data, collection and processing of data, exchange and service delivery infrastructure. The development of that capability is fundamental to ensure supporting climate resilient decision-making, sustainable development, and early warning systems for extreme weather and climate events. SDG17, on the other hand, can bring together stakeholders with complementary skills and resources to tackle the challenge of climate change. Partnerships can support the development of infrastructure by facilitating knowledge sharing and helping mobilizing resources for sustainable development to support capacity development. And therefore, the interlinkage between these two SDGs is quite relevant and important for the work of the World Meteorological Organization without which our efforts to modernize the infrastructure of our national meteorological and biological services, but also provide them with the needed capability to reach every citizen who is vulnerable to the impact of extreme weather and climate events is realized. So in concluding, I'd like to say this opportunity to first of all thank ITU who was one of the leaders of the pillars, one of the pillars of early warning for all the initiative for the collaboration you've been extending to us in trying to realize this major challenge, but also raise a challenge to you in your work by calling for more accessible use of technology of not only communicating whether in climate exchange, but for creating enabling environments where people can use these digitization or the digital technology development to promote innovation and possibly transformation. And so with that, I greatly wish you success in your activities, your deliberation today. And I look forward to continuing engaging and I have my colleague Cornelia engaging with work of the original forum of sustainable development because as I said earlier, your developments, your achievements are going to contribute considerably to what we do here at the World Meteorological Organization. Thank you. Thank you very much. And please let me thank to all of you for these messages. I think we got a lot of inspiration for all our discussions and the series of different interventions. We understand that your agendas are very busy, so please feel free whenever the time comes to go to your obligations. And we will be going into our work. And the agenda for today is very busy. However, before we are going into the next block, which is very special because of these that we want to, before discussing some things on the infrastructure innovation, first to focus on the digital inclusivity. And this brings us to the two keynote speakers who has kindly agreed to bring us the good news from the recent developments in New York from the Commission on status of women which was focusing on the technology and on the inclusiveness and how digital development can be further driven by also those approaches. And before we are starting the keynotes, I would like to invite you to use the earphones. So next to the microphones, you have also the headsets. And so please feel free to be ready to deploy them as we'll be using different languages during the interventions. So thank you very much colleagues for being with us. So without further delay, I would like to invite first and Alia El-Yassir, regional director of the UN Women Regional Office for Europe and Central Asia, the Florisers. Okay, great. Thank you very much. And thanks to all the core organizers for this roundtable and UN Women is a happy contributor here. We are here to focus within the context of the Regional Forum for Sustainable Development to look at our progress in relation to the Sustainable Development Goals. And it is of concern that according to current estimates, if we continue at their current rate of progress, it will take us 300 years to close gender gaps. And as has been mentioned in the opening, digitalization can be an accelerator or a savior of the Sustainable Development Goals. But I think it's also very important to note that it can, if we don't pay attention in trench existing inequalities and leave many women and girls behind. And that is why the Commission on the Status of Women, the 67th session that was held this year, did focus on innovation, technological change in education. It included, for the first time in three years, in-person attendance. And so we were really excited to see 7,000 people come to New York. This included four heads of state or head of government and 116 ministers. So it really gives a global vision to the issues. And just to say that also in light of what else is being discussed here, the 2022 Commission on the Status of Women did cover issues related to climate change, environment and disaster risk reductions. I think that this year what is happening is we're making a much firmer kind of connection between what is happening in the global meeting and having a conversation about what needs to be done in the region to implement, because it's all pushing in the direction of implementation of the 2030 agenda. So the agreed conclusions, and it was very difficult. I was there in the room. It was until 4 a.m. that they came to the agreed conclusions. There were tough negotiations. But here is what has been emphasized. And that is what I would like to present to you for reflection here. That we must develop digital tools and services to address the needs of all women and girls across sectors and geographies throughout their life course. We need to mainstream gender in digital policies to remove barriers to equal access for all women and girls in all their diversity. We need to foster a policy of zero tolerance for gender-based violence that occurs through or is amplified by the use of technology. And we must ensure that both public and private sector entities prioritize prevention and elimination. We need to mainstream a gender perspective in the design of emerging technologies and adopt regulations. This included a lot of discussion around artificial intelligence to make sure that there are adequate safeguards to combat new risks, gender stereotypes and negative social norms, data privacy breaches and improved transparency and accountability. We need to promote policies and programs to achieve gender parity in emerging scientific and technological fields and create supportive workplaces and education setting. Because there was a lot of discussion about how hostile it can be for women and girls. And we need to develop gender responsive innovation that challenges those gender stereotypes and negative social norms. So this is in a nutshell what the agreed conclusions emphasize for us all. And as the UN Women Executive Director highlighted at four o'clock in the morning at the end of the commission on the status of women's 67th session that these agreed conclusions do present a vision of a more equal world. But now the challenge is to translate that vision. So we have to transform these recommendations into practical actions at the regional and national and local levels as part of development agendas that include governments, private sector, civil society and very importantly young people. So the spirit of partnership is key. And on this note I would like to say that the commission on the status of women happens every year but we also have a global multi-stakeholder initiative which is called Generation Equality in which ITU and also the government of Armenia are action coalition leaders on the topic of innovation and technology for gender equality. And this is an action coalition that brings together all these multiple stakeholders international organizations, governments, private sector, civil society, regional organizations to really push the agenda forward. So I think it creates wonderful opportunities to carry these agreed conclusions from the CSW into the work of this action coalition and to bring more partners on board. And I just want to stop here because I know that the time is tight but happy to answer any questions that may come up on the CSW or this Generation Equality initiative and to really address also, you know because why Generation Equality is important because it tackles the important topic of financing and investments. And some over almost $250 million were committed under this action coalition and I think that that is where we need to start on these existing commitments that have been made and they are global in nature but the ECE region is very, very well represented in this initiative across the different action coalitions but particularly in this area. So now is the moment to move into action. Thank you very much. Great. Thanks. Thanks a lot for providing us this not only vision but also this what we have to do next and it's our great pleasure also today to be joined by the Deputy Minister of High Tech Industry of Armenia His Excellency Georg Mantashyan and now I would like to invite him to take the floor. I understand that you'll be speaking in Russian. So please feel free to use the headset. No, that's the wrong information. I'm not planning to speak in Russian. Actually, based on agenda, I was expecting to speak before at least Alia Yasir and seems there are a few things that need to be improved so I'm speaking English, no Russian at this moment. Usually I'm using this language for communication with ITU. My speaking prepared in English. So thank you very much for the invitation and by the way, my position is First Deputy Minister. Another thing to please also to use on a future correspondence. Thank you very much for invitation. We put a lot of reports. I hope you can see me right now on the screens and we really appreciate the efforts and our colleagues and Miss Alia Yasir fairly mentioned the engagement of the Armenian Islam. Historically, Armenia was showing the trying to be a role model on giving them more opportunity for the all member of the society. But I will start with highlighting the importance of today's gathering and we'll start from my speech. Ladies and gentlemen, it is my great pleasure to participate in the partnership for the inclusive and sustainable digital development ground table discussion on sustainable development for UNSC region. On July 1, 2020, Armenia joined the global leaders in the technology and innovation for gender equality action coalition of the UN lead gender laceration program culminating in the Generation Equality Forum. Armenia's domination for coalition leadership in technology and innovations is a testament to the priorities of the government of Armenia for advancing gender equality, political and economic empowerment of women as well as progress achieving in the ICT industry. The action coalition on technology and innovations is led by Armenia, Finland, Tunisia, Rwanda and Chile, five countries that have been selected to steer global action in cooperation with different international partners. During the Generation Equality Forum in Mexico, the action coalition's global exploration plan for gender equality was launched which consists of the blueprints for each of the six action coalition things including technology and innovation for gender equality. This is an important step toward achieving gender equality globally. In the framework of this initiative, Armenia has made two commitments policy and programmatic. To further advance gender equality in our country we believe that these commitments will have a significant impact on protecting the rights of the woman and the girl in Armenia and will contribute to the broader goal of achieving gender equality worldwide. Basically, this is an example to act as a role model. The policy commitment will promote technology in innovation development and decrease the involvement of girls and women in the tech industry through the elaboration of the high-tech strategy and national programs. The programmatic commitment consists of the three initiatives, girls in tech, non-formal training programs and tech innovation which will develop digital skills of the girls and women in Armenia, facilitate access and use of technology and innovation. Together with the UN we implement various programs to enhance entrepreneurial skills of girls and young women and promote their activities in the ICP industry. One of the initiatives introduced by the UN was the X-Ration 5 which provides training and the programming, business marketing and business English to over 300 girls and young women across Armenia. The program resulted in the development of the 10 new startup ideas and kick-starting of three Armenian startups. In addition to this, the UN introduced agricultural infrastructure in the 41 school across Armenia which acted as an important STEAM learning aid for 3,918 children and member of the school communities. The Ministry of High-tech Industry of Armenia implemented different initiatives for the promotion of the gender equality and increasing women participation in the high-tech industry. In addition to the 50% of employee being women, the Ministry has initiated several programs and empowering women in this sector as well. In 2020-2025 there is a strategy of Armenia also in these gates measures an organized educational program to the development of the digital and technical skills of women and girls. From ID to business initiative which is another program in the high-tech industry supports and realizes the innovation ideas and contributes to the development of the high-tech industry in Armenia. This program includes initiatives specifically targeted at women in tech. In the framework of the higher education institution private sector cooperation program which is another program of the ministry, IT specialization courses are empowered for the citizens of Armenia. This program includes participation supply in which 1,531 were women. In 2022 out of 791 graduates, 300 were women. And out of the 70-79 applicants 568 were women. The program is being revised and increased to the index of the women's participation. The program is unique in the form of the target of the specialists who went to scale up their knowledge and advance to seniority levels as well as those who went to enter the high-tech market. By empowering women in the tech sector the ministry aims to increase the number of women in leadership positions and as such entrepreneurs in Armenia. We believe this will open up new opportunities for the member of all the members of society. The ministry also supports startup technology companies with the female managers. In 2021, the share of such companies among the beneficiaries of the granted grant program were 16%. Furthermore, the ministry supports the participants of women in tech entrepreneurship competitions such as the Technovation Girl in Women program which aims to empower young girls to become leader and innovators in solving programs in their communities through technology and entrepreneurial skills. Since 2017 2552 school girls with 510 teams and 511 members mentors from all regions of Armenia have participated in the program. According to data from the first semester of 2022 the involvement of women in the field of Informative Technologies in Armenia was 43% compared to 40% in 2021. We prioritize the role of women in advanced and high-tech ecosystem in Armenia and implement various programs to unleash their potential in the country. We appreciate all the partners in the region who supported our initiatives to reach these targets. We wish you good luck and we are happy to contribute for the next achievements. Thank you very much. Thank you very much for your statement and thank you very much for updating us on so many success stories from your country and also the contribution to the other settings. So thank you very much also for your leadership in the international coordination which we are just mentioning. So dear ladies and gentlemen, let me thank our keynotes. I think with those messages we got a little bit already the good introduction into our session and discussion which will in the first block focus on the universal access to the internet connectivity where we are focusing on the meaningful connectivity so it's not only about connecting people but also making sure that this connectivity is universal, affordable and safe as well as used in the appropriate way in order to ensure the impact. We have with us four distinguished speakers representing different institutions coming from Kazakhstan, from Poland, from Oldova and also representative of the civil society. So let me dive into the first question which we wanted to ask to all our stakeholders on what are the critical solutions for developing robust and reliable ICT infrastructure that can provide universal, affordable and safe connectivity and I would like to direct maybe the first question to our colleagues from Kazakhstan, Miss Gulnara Bukheva representative of the Ministry of Digital Development Innovation and Aerospace Industry of Kazakhstan. So how new technologies can contribute to the development of the infrastructure and so how new technologies can contribute to the universality and affordability of connectivity. Over to you. Good afternoon, dear participants. Thank you for the opportunity to present the question. I would like to share with you the experience we had in Kazakhstan about the development of the R&D and the development of 5G. We did it by auction. You all know that the supply of high-speed Internet is the most relevant question. That is why this question is considered very relevant. The objective is to use limited national resources and we did an auction in December 2020 for the development of the platform of the electronic trading system of the platform under two slots. The first slot was presented by the frequency range of 3,600, 3,700 with a width of 100 MHz. The second slot, in the slots of 3,700, 3,800, is also the maximum width of 100 MHz. The initial price of each slot was set in the size of a five-time year-end payment for the use of the R&D in the amount of 1.7 billion TNG in our currency. Also, if we move to what was clear, 3.8 million dollars. As a result of the auction on the R&D, the final price of the slot was offered to the consortium, created by two of our operators. This is Mobile Telecom Service and also Rocky Seal. According to their offer, these frequencies were sold for 137 million dollars. In addition, the consortium of Kiesel and Mobile Telecom Service was offered to the second slot for 203 million dollars. As a result of the auction on the R&D, these frequencies were sold for 340 million dollars. The distribution of the open and transparent auction provided specific conditions in the competition, where companies could accept the open and transparent auction. From the operator's side, the license received in the form of permission to use the R&D and the accepted subscription. According to the subscription, it is expected that by 2027, the capture of each city will be set to 75% and the capital will be set to 75% and the capital will be set to 60%. Along with that, if you do not perform the data with the operators, my state has the right to take the permission to use the R&D. Thank you. Thank you very much and congratulations to all of you. I am sure that many countries will be seeking also your reporting on what you have achieved so far. But now let me turn to our colleague from Moldova, Olga. The head of the e-government agency is with us. As you maybe know, Moldova recently won the first prize of the best digital solution at the WISIS forum. Congratulations one more time. Could you tell us the key factor of the success of how the public digital services rollout can be ensured from your side? Indeed, to transform the connectivity into the meaningful one. Over to you. Thank you. Thank you very much for the opportunity to speak in this round table. To be present at the forum, it's a big pleasure for us to share the experience of Moldova because nowadays it is very important to act smart and to leverage as much as possible the potential of the technologies. In terms of digitalization of the country, we have very good contacts. We still have very good connectivity of the Internet. We still have a very good penetration rate of the Internet. At the same time, we have functional and operational important state registries. Nevertheless, back in time, we had public services that were digitized. That is why we were thinking what needs to be changed in order to boost and to accelerate the digitalization process of the public services. We started with some concrete actions that in time proved to be really successful factors that now allow us to have really good results. First of all, we invested a lot of efforts for developing a resilient e-governance ecosystem. We worked on it almost for 10 years, so we have developed a centralized level of important e-governance services such as digital identity, authentication service, a payment gateway, and an interoperability platform notification service. We developed also a private cloud infrastructure for all information system, governmental information system to be hosted in the government of cloud. We dedicated all this time, the effort to have all these services available and to be integrated and used by all public institutions that need to be and need to get involved in the digitalization process. The second factor was the regulatory framework, so we approved a law on public services, and the main idea of this law is that we need to have an interoperability platform that allows us to have an interoperability platform that allows us to have the main idea of this law is that it states for the first time in the history of our country that all public services need and must be provided digitally by default and digitally first, so this somehow accelerated and give us a new spin in our activities and the digitalization agenda. At the same time, we are applying the engineering methodology that help us to simplify the services before digitalizing them, so we are now before digitizing, we are thinking simplifying, including documents and designing the services from the perspective of the one that is the user. In this way, we have more inclusive, we have more accessible services and more user-friendly. Last but not least, we decided to provide digitization as a service for our service providers through a front office digitization platform that is a very good instrument for quick and standardized way to digitize public services. Briefly, this is our experience. We are still working and looking for new idea and country's experience that we can implement in Moldova in order to be more efficient and to implement in our services the needs of our citizens. Thank you. Thank you very much for this and congratulations to these great achievements. After hearing these experiences how you made the transformative change at the country level, we can ask ourselves what to do in order to make sure that the human is in the center of our efforts to make sure that digital transformation is really prioritizing the human-centric approach. It's my great pleasure to introduce Excellency Łukasz Różycki, Deputy Permanent Representative of the Permanent Mission of Poland to United Nations in Geneva and asking what are today the key barriers to rolling out the human-centered digital development from your point of view. Good afternoon. I would like to warmly thank organizers for invitation to take to this honourable panel the Polish perspectives and rather perspective of diplomat, not technical expert. So there are the numbers of barriers to the human-centered digital development so due to time constraints I will focus only on four most prominent one and the first it's not enough the multi-stakeholder cooperation different stakeholders, governments, private sector, civil society, academia should cooperate more effectively and to ensure that the interests of everyone it's heard and the interests are met. And the building in that perspective the building and the partnership need to take place between sectors and cross-border. So the cooperation on the regional and global level, international level are key importance. We believe that the discussion on the global digital compact gives us a perfect opportunity to ensure that this human-centric approach is properly taken into account and in this context I would also like to stress the importance of breaking silos and building bridges within the UN system and I think that this gathering today is a great example of a kind of activity so that kind of actions are very important for Poland and we are trying to promote them. So in this context I would like to pay your attention to our recent initiative at the Human Rights Council when the Poland presented the resolution on the good governance which were focused on the nexus between human rights, good governance and the new technologies and this resolution stressed the importance of addressing the problem of different forms of digital divide and recognize the new technologies can play a pivotal role in strengthening democratic institution as well as civil society. And also quite recently in the New York Poland led the work in the UNGA resolution on building global resilience through regional and inter-regional infrastructure connectivity which focus on the importance of the digital cooperation that was a significant element of this resolution. The second barrier I would like to mention is the digital divide so addressing different kinds of digital divide is a crucial if you want to ensure the human-centric digital development. And it is important to know that there are more than one digital divide and we can observe different levels of actors to the internet between women and men. The representative of the UN women empowerment is important in the investment in the connectivity and digital development. And the division line of course are visible not only within the countries but of course between them depending on the level of the development. That is why to address those digital divides is important to take several steps. One of them is investment in digital infrastructure of course to bring allow the access to speed internet data centers and so on. The second one of course is to allow the citizens access to the devices, to the hardware. And at the same time infrastructure and devices are not enough if the people have not enough skills so digital literacy is important and it allows citizens to enjoy both advantages of the new technologies but also at the same time minimizing the negative impact of the misuse such as this information. Closing digital divide is one of key priorities for Poland and we have working hard to ensure digital development and address digital divides and thanks to various programs which have been implemented and focusing by the government and focusing on development of the infrastructure digital services and digital skills we really achieved before the outbreak of the COVID the common access to digital education which was especially it was very important during the COVID outbreak so all schools were provided with free of charge access to the internet enabling the access to digital curriculum and so on. And now by the 2024 we are planning to invest more than 2 billion euros in broadband further expanding connectivity and access to the internet in rural areas and so on. And very briefly I would like to I know that the time is running so touch upon two further constraints we have found is most prominent. So first the lack of understanding of the new technologies and this is related to their positive potential but also to threats or negative consequences. And in that context I would like to underline that in very cases of very often the normative frameworks cannot grasp let alone provide savers against negative impacts of the new emerging technologies and also that this normative efforts at the international level are not in general slower than on the international on the national one. So this pose quite often the challenges for international community. And the last but not least the barrier also is in balance in power when it comes to the knowledge and the use of the new new technologies. And to conclude I would like to stress that the digital development must focus on the people and that the technologies should be only a tool to achieve it and technologies should be not the goal itself. Thank you very much. Thank you very much and ladies and gentlemen indeed the time is running but thank you very much for bringing these success stories we hear about big investment, big impact expected so we are looking forward and we hope that many other countries will be able also to generate this level of investment in the connectivity but the connect investment comes also with enabling environment and let me turn to our speakers on the really 60 seconds intervention pointing straight to the point and let me turn first to Kazakhstan so what are the regulatory measures that could be critical to facilitate universal Internet access development Thank you very much. In Kazakhstan we have large cities and large population they are provided by the services of the connection at a sufficient level. As we call it, as a fair break we have a rural area, therefore, due to the lack of investment attractiveness of the connection services, rural areas and communication operators are not interested in working. Therefore, we our state subsidizes, provides the operation of the universal service operator which is obligated to provide a minimum package of communication services with high quality and value level. In 2004 this work is carried out thanks to the subsidizing of universal services in rural areas tariff for universal services in rural areas average on 40% less than in the city. Subsidizing is provided in order to cover the losses of the operator due to the universal service in rural areas. Subsidizing is determined as a difference between the costs and the actual income due to the universal service of communication. Since 2022 on the common universal services it has been expanded a little. Now it is in the service of the internet network with a speed of two to eight megabits per second. This is mainly the technology of ADSL. Also, the services of the internet network with a speed of eight megabits per second. And also the services of local communication. There is a return mechanism of the budget service of universal services. And in accordance with our legislation these budgets are also returned by operators. In some way, the Republican budget is paid for the supply of international telecommunications as well as high-end communications in order to distribute the information. This is one and thirty-nine percent per year from income. Operators of communication pay the budget and due to this we provide the supply of universal services. Thank you very much. Thank you very much for this and let me now move to our colleague from Moldova. In your view, what are practical actions which you would foresee and recommend to the others to make really this meaningful connectivity truly human-centered? Well, we are suggesting to have developed and implemented an engineering methodology in our case. This worked very well because, as mentioned before, we are digitizing public services only after re-engineering them and in this context we are really looking for a more human-centric approach so we are trying to get rid of the practices that are usually implemented by service provider based on some practices that they are used to implement and to take the processes from the perspective of the users. As I said, in our case it worked well and it's a very good argument in the process of the digitalization and nevertheless it is a very good possibility to modernize the service and to make it more flexible and make it appropriate to the needs of the current time and of the direct users of the services. At the same time, it is very important to have the national level and authority that will overview all this process. In Moldova, it is the role of the governance agency together with the State Chancellery. And operating with service providers, helping them, consulting them in the process of the modernization of their services and making their services more inclusive and more adapted to the needs of the users. Thank you. Great, thank you very much. So I would like to thank very much to all representatives of Kazakhstan, Poland, Moldova for bringing all those issues together from the point of view of those who are creating this inclusive digital access for all with the human centric approach. But of course for us, it is important also to hear the voice of those who are representing the society. And this is the reason why we are today joined by Oli Penman, representing the Action for Sustainable Development. So we would like your standpoint what do you see as needed to foster this inclusion and ensure that the needs of the population are met online. Over to you. Okay, thank you very much. Thank you so much for this opportunity. We really appreciate it. I'm speaking on behalf of the Regional Civil Society Engagement Mechanism. We've had some discussions already yesterday as you know as a group of civil society organizations. And I think this issue is very, very important to many of us. And I very much appreciate some of what's been said from the different member states we've heard from, particularly some of the comments from Poland in terms of how different groups are being left behind and where those digital divides are still excluding many people. So we have two observations and two recommendations. The first one is indeed the importance of leaving no one behind. Digital technology, we believe has great potential for participation and decentralization. It has the power to lower barriers and potentially reduce inequality. But there is a need to provide stronger opportunities for digital inclusion at the national level as we've been hearing and to ensure direct support to those who are most marginalized. To bridge the digital divide we need to ensure affordable infrastructure is available. But infrastructure is not the only barrier as you know to participation. We recommend the provision of training for digital literacy capacity development, particularly for older people and vulnerable groups. Secondly in terms of digital civic space we see that there's been in a number of countries digital restrictions placed on the actions of individuals and civil society groups and there's a practice of blocking and restricting access to independent and human rights information resources in a number of countries in the region. And in addition we feel that technology is being used to limit activism and put pressure on activists and this online intimidation would prevent partnerships across borders. Online harassment and bullying also takes place in a private setting in the private sphere and we know that during the COVID pandemic women in particular have suffered disproportionately from online violence. At the same time many countries lack sufficient regulation to prevent such practices. So adopting a scope of protective measures also updating some of the existing legislation against harassment and bullying would be necessary to eliminate online abuses. And finally the last two recommendations one maybe thinking ahead and thinking along the lines of some of what's been described using the power of technology to really share frontline stories and to really bring forward the experiences of those who are so often left behind can be really, really powerful and that's something that we as an organization have developed a new platform we called ZOVU which is precisely to bring forward frontline voices and potentially to bring funding also directly to those groups. And finally the idea of a digital charter of some kind because we know that the human rights that we all depend upon and not always brought up to date into the digital world and so we think that there's space for looking at how a digital bill of rights could be brought together perhaps at the UN and that that would be drafted with inputs from civil society to ensure that those rights are also protected globally. Thank you very much. Great, thank you very much for this perspective it's extremely important for us that we're combining these approaches of those who are really doing the work on the ground and to those who are supporting to introduce also the corrective measures to represent and to make sure that this human centric approach really means this what we expect as humans. So thank you very much for this intervention and the ladies and gentlemen this brings us to the end of the first part of this panel because the second panel will allow us to dive into the two particular cases of the concrete action on the ground coming from the two countries from Bosnia Herzegovina and to please let me welcome with us Meliha Kovacevich head of the telecommunication licensing department from communication regulatory authority of Bosnia Herzegovina who will present us the project on the establishment of the broadband mapping systems. Of course for many of those who are dealing with the cables on the daily basis it's something normal for the others it sounds like exciting projects to build upon and to see how this can generate additional value added for policy making for the digital inclusion and for many policy making to make sure that inclusiveness really means something to everyone. So let me hand over to you. I was reminded that we are really running late with the agenda so that's why I would like to invite you not to take longer than five minutes. Thank you. Over to you. Good afternoon everybody. Your Excellencies, dear colleagues, ladies and gentlemen so my name is Meliha Kovacevich thank you for having me here so it's my honor and pleasure to speak as representative of the communications regulatory agency of Bosnia Herzegovina so are you prepared some slides hopefully oh yes we can see the slides yeah great so great as Yaroslav said I come from the communications regulatory agency we are a national regulatory body established back in 2000 we are responsible for the regulation of telecommunications and broadcasting sector so we can be invited today to share experience and measures taking on improving internet connectivity and particularly we shall speak today about our activities on establishment of a broad and mapping system so I would like briefly to give some background of explain background of broad and mapping what it actually is and why it is so important I would like to share information on ITU technical assistance project that was implemented for us and to conclude with some lessons learned so we are all aware that digital transformation can be fully realized if high quality secure access to communication services is available so affordable prices fall so therefore we need to ensure that all policies and all investments in digital infrastructure should aim to ensure connectivity accessible to all and everywhere to close digital divide so in achieving this goal it is necessary to establish collaboration between stakeholders including policy makers and regulatory bodies speaking about state of the broadband access in both the head to governor so we are aware that we are still lagging behind for example in 2021 69% of the households had an broadband access speaking about representation of speeds so we may see that majority of connections are still between 2 megabits and 10 megabits so therefore by joining to connect digital coalition communications regulatory agency made a pledge to develop and to improve regulatory framework that would provide incentives to invest in high capacity broadband to promote competition and to ensure secure access to high quality communication networks and services for all so to achieve this goal we have identified three measures measure one is to identify data on networks and services measure two second to develop new and updated existing regulatory framework and measure three to monitor the implementation of regulatory obligations so we have recognized the importance of establishing broadband mapping as a prerequisite for such an effective regulation broadband mapping can broadly be defined as digitized information system that gather structures and represents geo-referenced data about the reach or quality of networks and services such data support and decision making process for regulators to assess market competition to assess gaps in coverage or quality experience it's necessary for governments to allocate funds it's necessary for operators to plan investments and of course for citizens to decide and to choose the best service provider so within this regulatory framework European Union has years ago so we defined the obligations and proposed measures on on-road mapping so being aware of the importance of broadband mapping in order to overcome some shortcomings in our country we have applied for technical assistance for ITU so in 2021 the project under the title enabling environment for broadband mapping in Bosnia and Herzegovina was launched so in 2022 we have received two reports developed by ITU and ACOS experts from the regulatory agency of Slovenia the first report gave us a recommendation ranging from policy and regulatory matters proposals for collaboration relevant institutions the second report gave us technical specifications covering areas including IT resources, compliance with technical standards and all other let's say technical details so within the project number of meetings with different stakeholders have been organized it's very important to receive institutional support once when you have it it's easy to project and to define all technical specifications so we have been warned throughout the project that it is very important to follow the road map when establishing broadband mapping there are a lot of decisions that need to be taken about technical specification then it's not just a set up a project you need to perform successful management of the project we can conclude we are very thankful for the information we have gathered through the project so really recommendations given by ITU experts provide it can support to CRA in implementing this this broadband mapping project and we are currently in the process of implementation of our initial let's say this model so we still have a lot of work to do ahead of us just to conclude no back it's gone it was not us I think this was planned to be so it was me just to conclude so this project may really serve as a very positive example of knowledge sharing between old stakeholders great thank you very much and warmest greetings to the Bosnia Herzegovina congratulations on the progress made and a lot of inspiration for the other countries because these data maps of course they are providing as I mentioned a lot of opportunities for the policy making not specifically related only to the infrastructure development but also to the public policies education health system and many many others and now let's move to Kyrgyz internet society Mr Palant Sultanov is together today with us and he will share with us the experience on building community networks to connect remote mountains, villages and anchor location schools as well as provide examples how innovative ICT based solutions and emerging technologies can be leveraged to support governments in mitigating environmental risks and the challenges but will be in fact the transition to the next session already and we have the moderator and the chair of the next session already with us so welcome Vanessa with us and now hand over to Talent thanks so much chair it's a pleasure to be here and I prepared some slides and my presentation will be in Russian so let me try to share my screen I hope it's visible yes we still don't see the screen and I'm just taking the time to remind about the five minutes limit maybe I'll use the far point version instead of the pdf maybe that will be more convenient whatever works for you okay share can you see it now we can see the slides very well excellent thanks so much good afternoon dear colleagues very glad to be at today's forum we wanted to share the experience of Kyrgyzstan let me go straight to the main slide I think for this audience I don't need to explain why Central Asia is important globally so I wanted to go to this slide Central Asia is considered not having access to the sea also there are mountain countries there are countries that double and locked like Uzbekistan and therefore all this makes the digital development in our countries very difficult moreover one of the experts called our region also sanctions locked that is we associate with countries that are now under sanctions and therefore to the Internet it becomes much more more difficult than other regions of the world then you can do to solve these challenges and I wanted to give some examples and also as our round table called partnership to show how we in partnership with other stakeholders develop digital situation in Kyrgyzstan the very first is to understand how much there is how sharp it is and there is an initiative called Giga between ITU and NSF and within this initiative there was a map where all schools of Kyrgyzstan were marked and marked which is the Internet also marked schools where there is no Internet and for us it was a very useful map that we chose these schools where there is no Internet to understand the situation and here on the picture you see the village of Enilchek is very far in the mountains a very beautiful place, there lives snowy bars, however when all schools were closed due to COVID-19 children had to move to other cities where there is Internet and here is the girl Alia she turned to the holidays to meet her director and it turns out a very difficult situation we tried to do it we went to all these schools where there is no Internet and first of all brought these devices which we called iLIMBOX or Knowledge in partnership with the European Union in partnership with the US embassy we delivered the Internet in these schools that is, these devices work without access to the Internet that is, all this is loaded into hard disks then we decided that these devices are not enough and we chose the most difficult villages where we tried to spend the real Internet and often in these villages there was not even electricity in these schools so we had to deliver solar panels as the village of Zardaly in partnership with the ITU-VNSE and in these pictures you see places where we had to get there often we had to go to the cars, to the washers to deliver all this equipment sometimes the wires broke and we had to process it manually like here we have a plastic bottle to protect the Internet from weather conditions and here, of course, it is very important to celebrate partnership with the local communities with international partners for example, partners from Georgia came to us and shared their experience from India and even in some cases we had to contact the border guards so that they could help us to deliver solar panels to some villages further, even if the Internet is in these villages, there are not always devices that is, the presence of computers or laptops is very minimal in households and we asked people to deliver their unused smartphones and in this case one of the examples was a member of the correspondent of the Kyrgyz Academy of Science and we gave this device to a little girl in the village of Engelchek and we hope that this girl, Rayana, will also grow up and become a member of the correspondent academy if there is Internet if there are devices, we found that there is very little content in local language, in the Kyrgyz language and therefore we launched such a platform called Elimbox 2.0 it is an online platform that is free available on the phones through the application where all the knowledge of the school program is loaded and the schoolchildren can use to learn even if they, for example, are quarantined next there is Internet there are devices there is content the presence of digital skills it was the next challenge and we launched a project called Sanarip Insan or digital citizen where we travel all over the region of Kyrgyz with the support of the European Union and teach girls girls, mainly women young digital skills so that they can use digital platforms for economic opportunities the next moment that we wanted to note is that the more people go on the Internet the more vulnerable they become and here the previous speaker Olya Hanman said that there is threat on the Internet and in order for the population not to be under great threat we teach the population the project of the tech for society which is supported by the foundation Soros-Kyrgyzstan and the last thing that will lead us to the next session these technologies also help us to be ready for climate threats and we use IoT, smart devices, sensors to measure climate conditions this project is implemented with the support of the foundation also with the support of the European Union Toba and the foundation of the rescue of snow bars and here is my last slide I just wanted to list the principles with which we work in the Internet development the first is that all our the project should be oriented for girls if they are convenient, interesting for girls, then we think there will be a big impact the second is that it should be for rural residents in the cities there are a lot of possibilities for the citizens, but in the region if you go, there are very few third, since there are no laptops and computers in the population we adapt everything to mobile phones the next is the importance of content in the local language and of course green first technologies should be green and without damage to the environment we will try to invest in our time over to you thank you very much that is a perfect transition I would like to welcome you to the second part of this event with the topic now on green and digital and we are going to talk about sustainable digital transformation and digital transformation for sustainability maybe first before I introduce the table discussion we have a keynote speaker video that is who is the chief digital officer of the United Nations environment program if we could have that video please first thank you good evening, good afternoon, good morning everyone and thank you very much for the opportunity to speak to you today as UNEP's chief digital officer of the United Nations I would like to focus today on two dimensions that I think are missing from most of these conversations the first one is the need for digital transformation to be sustainable by design it is essential to minimize the environmental impact and footprint of technology including energy use greenhouse gas emissions but also water consumption, toxic chemicals and e-waste to put this into context global carbon footprint of the IT industry is around 2.4% of global greenhouse gas emissions that is roughly equivalent to the aviation industry's carbon footprint before the pandemic in 2019 the record 53.6 million metric tons of e-waste was produced globally the equivalent weight of 125,000 Boeing 747 drum budgets yet only 17.4% of e-waste documented is formally collected and recycled looking forward at least 24 elements including rare earth metals will be critical for the digital future and demand for them is rising rapidly for example demand for graphite, lithium and cobalt is expected to increase by 500% by 2050 this is clearly unsustainable for the intended we need standards that promote sustainable digitalization tools to measure and disclose the environmental and carbon footprint of tank also ones that can support better supply chain management tracking and tracing key minerals across the economy to improve recovery reuse and circularity the second dimension is the need for digital transformation to be guided by incentives, standards and safeguards that enable global environmental sustainability outcomes the UN has already taken the lead on developing a global recommendation by ethics led by UNESCO but more work is needed to implement those guidelines at the country level and to link them directly to environmental sustainability values and goals for example using technologies such as satellite imagery and internet of things to monitor global carbon emissions in near real time and feeding this data into markets to drive investment decisions we're using e-commerce platforms to help empower people to compare products on their environmental performance by embedding sustainability goals into our digital applications we can make significant strides towards the sustainable future to address these critical gaps UNEP is working on four global initiatives first UNEP co-founded the Coalition for Digital Environmental Sustainability or CODES an open multi-stakeholder platform that aims to address sustainability dimensions through a series of coordinated impact investments by public-private partnerships we're also investing in the development of a global environmental data strategy and the platform to aggregate the best available environmental data so it can be used to monitor trends, commitments and solutions at the global and national levels this will go hand in hand with developing data standards that enable sharing interoperability and quality control UNEP is also exploring a partnership with the ITU to jointly focus on the development of standards for measuring and monitoring e-waste emissions from the digital sector as well as advising countries on green digital transformation policies and programs finally UNEP is establishing a tech-for-planet alliance of private sector civil society and research entities interested in driving forward our data-driven solutions to environmental problems and promoting environmental behaviors within their platform in conclusion it's imperative that we prioritize environmental sustainability in our digital transformation efforts we cannot achieve a sustainable future without addressing both the risks and opportunities of digital technologies for our planet this requires a concerted effort from all stakeholders including governments private sector civil society and individuals as digital technologies continue to shape our world we must ensure that they serve the collective goals of all humanity and drive a sustainable future for all we must harness the power of innovation to create a world that can definitely sound socially trust and economically prosperous thank you for your attention and let us all work together towards a sustainable digital future okay thank you yes so excellent overview of course and also highlighting the importance of different stakeholders working together and we've also already heard here ITU and UNEP are working very closely together on this topic because when you talk about green these are of course two of the key UN organizations that will be involved so here today we've brought together a great panel of experts today to discuss what we often call the mega trends of green transformation and digital transformation and how they are linked how they reinforce each other but also a little bit to talk about the steps that need to be taken and the opportunities that we have to ensure that this transition is successful before I introduce the panels I'd just like to highlight a little bit on this urgency of this topic we know that more and more people are joining the global information society we've already heard a lot about that today and are benefiting from the opportunities we have more and faster networks new applications and services and these are delivered at increasingly high speeds and bringing new opportunities to many people but people but also they help reduce emissions through for example video conferencing smart metering and transport systems to name just a few and I think we'll hear more examples in just a few minutes at the same time the data show that Europe generated 12 million tons of e-waste every year and that is 16 kilograms for every person we already heard in the video the global figure and less of this in Europe is recycled only 17% globally is recycled and this also means that billions are lost and our digital society is of course also increasing the amounts of energy and contributing to GHG emissions so it's clear to address today's environmental crisis the ICT sector must continue to become more circular and sustainable and effective policies and actions by governments are key here also to address the critical material crisis we just also heard about this which is often strategic and political importance given that although they exist in abundance rare earths are difficult to extract and here the EU passed the critical raw materials act to help the region be better prepared so we are today looking back at over a century worth of environmental impact from our global dependence on coal, oil and gas and as we struggle to limit global warning to below 1.5 degrees we need to look at the precious resources at play today and how these determine our future but unlike coal, oil and gas we have an opportunity to get back precious resources after using them and for this we of course need the ICT regulatory community and industry to act together to make responsible and with this I would like to pass to the experts the panelists we have today with us Anne Yvonne-Billion who is the director of economy markets and digital at ARCEP which is the French telecommunication regulatory authority we have with us Hugo Andra Costa who is the executive director of the Portuguese space agency we also have with us Elias Yacovides who is advisor on the digital aspect of green transition at the European commissions director at general for communication networks, content and technology known as DG Connect and finally Umberto Modigliani who is the deputy director of forecasts of the European center for medium range weather forecast so a very diverse panel to help us address just greening with ICTs but also greening of ICTs and my first question I would like to address to you Elias given the topic of our panel here today maybe if you could just say a little bit more about what we are actually talking about what is the green digital transformation all about Elias Thank you Vanessa, thank you for having me I would like to congratulate the previous example from Kyrgyzstan because that was the only one that mentioned actually a green transition as part of the digital digitalization and I would like to call the previous panel speakers if they are still around to rethink what they talk when they talk about human centered ICT because what we have been doing for many decades is to apply digitalization to improve economic dimension of sustainability recently we also discovered that there is a social dimension and that's why the human centered is very much to bring the social dimension in front but we have been doing nothing on the environmental dimension and if human centered would represent the three dimensions fine but we need to maybe redefine what human centered means otherwise we are actually focusing only on two dimensions of sustainability and that is the economic and social and many times we did you connect where we have this super index digital economy and society index and name says it all so far what we managed to grasp as digitalization by design is the economic and some parts of social dimension so what is green and digital transition between transition as we talk about it first of all what it is not because many people abuse this term to say green transition and digital transition are more equal than the other transitions political, demographic health energy whatever so it is not that those two are more equal than or more important than the others it is all about their synergies and when we look at synergies what people mostly see and what journal is mostly see is their conflict it's actually the pollution aspect that Sally was talking about it's the e-waste for me that's more important than the energy consumption which is 8% of electricity today and that will only grow and our projections are like 14% by 2030 of electricity the carbon aspect will maybe plateau because mostly of this electricity most of these will be renewables but it's the materials that are not stopping to grow and they are not recyclable so what we need to do is to make sure that and I'll talk about it later that we need to make it more circular so what I would like to say is can we think again about digital compare is it really by design three-dimensional or are we just throwing green here and there while the two dimensions prevail in the digital compact so this is a call to say green and digital transition is about the synergies it's about bringing the third forgotten dimension of sustainability and that is the environmental one into the design of digitalization and to make digitalization in the service of sustainability in it's all full scope because we have missed that so far so that's what the green digital transition is about now I can go into Glangierites level lower I don't think we have time because we are really late so yes it is about making the digital world more green that is the footprint and there we do a lot of actions that we work with UNEP and ITU and ITU is very well aware and it's producing a lot of standards on how to reduce and how to measure but more importantly that's where we have much better leverage is to use smartly the digital for all these three dimensions but we do not have science based agreed target methodology yet so there is the first ITU standard that was adopted in December of 2022 we are working on methods and guidelines on how to interpret and use it correctly so soon there will be very concrete guidelines how you can use digital and have also positive environmental effects because at the moment we only talk about potentials about estimates about what could be done but we are not realizing the potential because we don't know what to measure and how to keep digital within the positive space of contribution very quickly digitalization can turn into a nightmare through rebound effects and through too many gadgets around that do not actually serve the purpose so I stop here just to say one thing that if I had to choose one area where digital can make the biggest difference is it energy is it mobility is it buildings is it agriculture I would select circular economy the silver bullet for digital is to enable circularity of our economy because the non-circularity of our economy is the biggest driver of climate change and biodiversity laws and natural resources thank you thank you very much Elias and turning now to Ugo Andrew Acosta my question is what specific advantages does satellite data bring to the green digital transition thank you good afternoon everyone and thank you very much Vanessa for inviting the Portuguese Space Agency to join today's event well I will thank the previous speaker because you just gave me the point to start bringing space to the green transition if we think about one of the main aspects is for having a greener world is related to transportation nowadays we need to move towards vehicles that don't use fossil fuels we are moving towards a world where autonomous automobiles will be in our streets this will help us to reduce energy consumption but they can only be autonomous and we can only have this benefits in terms of energy spending if we have two conditions one is they know exactly each vehicle where is their position in timing so we need satellite installations for like JPS like Galileo from Europe and second they need to be interconnected and you can only have vehicles interconnected if we have a sustainable network and we need satellites to do that we need satellites for the positioning and timing and we need satellites for connecting all the vehicles and also internet of things because in cities yes we have ground infrastructure that allows this connectivity but in the moment that you might run out of the signal we have an issue and so what we need is in fact to have a mobile phone that can connect independently of the network if it's ground infrastructure of course this will pose a challenge for ITU but if we think about the future this is where we should aim at and therefore it's important constellations like what the European Commission is now proposing with Iris internet connectivity connectivity satellite constellation also we see on the private sector many companies providing connectivity throughout the world and this is what will change in the near future for transportation now if you think about also the green transformation looking on Earth using Earth observation satellites we have for example the Copernicus satellites from the European Commission where they are providing crucial information or data that can be transformed into information where we can do better planning for the cities regarding for example management of risk of floods when you go to rural areas managing the forest fires managing the forest so we need to we are using space information space data even though normally we we don't recognize because it's because for us but space is crucial for this transformation mobility on green and digital transition it's taking ah there we go yes thank you very much we actually had a meeting this morning with some satellite industries and they they mentioned and we were talking also about the ubiquity and the interconnectedness of space and mobile and terrestrial networks so I think we'll talk about that in the future so my next question is to Umberto Modigliani and I would like to know from you what other type of ICT based solutions there are and how can these solutions help improve weather forecasting accuracy and resilience in the face of environmental risk so here talking in particular about climate adaptation application thank you well first I would like to say that national meteorological and meteorological services already use information and communication technologies based solution and emergency technologies to mitigate environmental risk and challenges and as some of you the early warning system that is developed by national meteorological services already use a combination of radar, satellite, weather station data that observe the earth and deliver early warnings of extreme weather events with the help of quite advanced ICT solution like the use of supercomputers and forecast models that are making use of the latest scientific advanced advances this system in general has been widely credited with helping to save lives and property by giving people enough time to prepare for potential plans for example additionally NMHS is also playing a key role in collecting, storing and analyzing meteorological data to inform the decision making related to environmental risk management having said that in the recent WMO regional conference on the future role of national meteorological services that was had last September this service important platform for the national meteorological services to collaborate and discuss how this ICT based solution can be used to support government in mitigating environmental risks but I think it's important to realize that this can only be achieved if governments that play an important role in making NMHS help them leverage the ICT based solution and emerging technologies by providing financial resources and technical expertise and by investing in research and facilitating collaborations between the private sector public sector and research organization and in general creating awareness campaigns to promote sustainable development as mentioned just by the previous speaker there are also programs by the European commission such as the Copernicus program the space part but also the service part and the destination earth initiative in which ECMWF plays a pivotal role and these are quite instrumental in the future to enable sustainable development as another example of an activity that has been quite successful recently the prevention and preparedness and response to disaster in the east of the European civil protection mechanism was an example of how government can support NMHS in leveraging ICT based solution and emerging technologies to mitigate environmental risk as part of this program National Meteorological Service in Ukraine and Moldova are being supported at the moment to issue impact based forecast daily bulletin supplies situational awareness to humanitarian actors and other organizations responsible for managing crisis caused by the conflict in the region and this can be used to protect citizens and mitigate environmental risk what is important is that managing emergency during conflict by putting science and humanitarian aid together can be a game changer and this because this is a very effective and coordinated use of all the available resources both ICT based, the science based and so on thank you thank you very much and we are here of course in the WMO building we have a large of the early warning for all initiative leading on this and you mentioned a number of examples of ICTs being used but also on the pillar on warning communication and dissemination which I use leading on that's to bring messages that alerts to people at risk of course ICTs and networks and services also play a critical role thank you very much the next expert is to leave after your intervention so very quickly two questions to you this is on the role that ICT the ICT regulatory community can play of course from the point of Arsep in protecting the environment and that the regulatory agencies on the environment can play themselves but also maybe if you can say a little bit about the kind of data that regulators can collect to monitor and manage for example we're talking about e-waste about other environmental issues also thank you thank you very much I'm going to speak in French first of all thank you for this invitation which gives me the opportunity to present the approach of the French regulator of telecom and its work for a digital question it was mentioned in the previous interventions but we are aware of course that the digital is a important lever to improve the sobriety in other areas but you have to actually remember and wonder about the environmental impact of digital which is called to grow with a very strong increase in users and the growth of users and the impact that the environmental impact of this fact seems not compatible with the objectives of the Paris Accords which brought us to the RCEP and more globally in France to ask us about the measure of the environmental impact of digital and to make the observation that even if there are several studies that measure the environmental impact of digital there is finally a lack of harmonization in the measurement methods sometimes a lack of transparency on the reliable data necessary to make a measure to make a measure of the environmental impact of digital and this measure also needs technical knowledge to have a fine measure which takes into account the different components of digital the different stages of the cycle of life of digital and it is valid for all sectors of course this measure is also for digital and that is why I answer your first question there is a strong complementarity between the environmental agencies in France they are called ADEM and the regulatory authorities and if we focus on digital the regulatory authorities of the telecom so the RCEP in France the complementarity of the environmental agencies they have skills on the measurement techniques of the environmental impact on the methods on the different impact indicators and we talk a lot about carbon emissions but there is and you have called it many other aspects many other impact criteria to take into account we talked about waste we must obviously talk about rare metals, rare earths there are some number of criteria to take into account carbon emissions, environmental agencies have these skills and to be able to have a precise measurement of the impact of a sector it is also important to have precise technical skills for digital the different branches of digital so focus not only on terminals, devices but also on networks the data centers, what we call the three branch of digital have a good knowledge of their cycle of life this complementarity it is also necessary because once we have a precise list of components of the sector and in the case of digital which we are looking to measure the environmental impact to take out a photo and a precise measurement of the impact of each of the components on the different environmental criteria which is interesting obviously to precondize to have public policy levers to be able to do projections and there again the articulation that can have a sector regulator like the RCEP with the environmental skills that can have an environmental agency extremely precious to do projections and evaluate for example the growth hypothesis of uses growth of equipment which are necessary to support these uses the hypothesis on the evolution of technologies the substitution of technologies the hypothesis on the coverage of networks so all this forms an ensemble of skills which are extremely complementary to give a concrete example of the translation of this complementarity in 2020 the French government entrusted to the ADEM so the French Environmental Agency and the RCEP, the Telecom regulator a joint mission to evaluate the environmental impact of digital in France in 2020 so a photo and to evaluate also in a prospective dimension this environmental impact this is what we have done and the report was made public and put back last March so it's very recent it's an approach that describes the method I was talking about the importance of having a method harmonized transparent which is accessible and understandable because it must be contestable it's part of the game we have so realized this impact measure by decomposing well the three aspects of the digital networks, data centers the terminals with an approach in life cycle which is extremely important in the matter so we are interested in the production phase of equipment until their end of life and in the recycling aspect of these equipment and with an analysis which is multi-critical so we look at the impact on the emissions of greenhouse gases but also on electrical consumption but also on the pollution so the whole of these results are in the report to give you a little overview so we have a distribution of the impacts on greenhouse gases which is as follows so the terminals represent 80% of the environmental impact in terms of carbon gas greenhouse gas emissions in France the data centers are 15% in 2020 and the networks 5% and if we project if nothing is done no activity no energy efficiency action for example in 2030 the greenhouse gas emissions will increase by almost 50% and it could be tripled in 2050 if no action is taken in the matter thank you thank you very much we work a lot with the RCEP I think also because you have this expertise and very important that you have highlighted the importance of working between the expertise of the telecom regulator but also with the ADEM the expertise of the people who work in the environment thank you very much so we just heard about the environmental footprint and how this needs to be managed and of course reduced so with this I would like to ask another question to you Elias and that is what are the environmental policy measures that we need to better manage and reduce this footprint thank you and sorry two minutes please because I think sorry you muted two minutes please because we're running out of time thank you and sorry I'm sorry I have a question I would like to ask a question I will put in the chat I do not know who can see chat but I will put some links so you can see that later if I can rephrase a bit I mean the best way to reduce footprint is not to do anything let's stop deploying 5G data centers everything that's the way to reduce but we can't it's all dimension so we can't do that so the best way we can do is to improve the net impact of digitalization so let's grow the digitalization but let's make sure that every growth of digitalization you have triple 10 times more sustainability benefits that means avoided emissions better social and economic progress so I would say we need policies for we need policies for maximizing the net effect positive minus the negative so how do we get there first we need to make sure that we use the minimum number of equipment for the goals we want to reach so we need to make sure that digital infrastructures, data centers telecoms are as green as possible we have measures ITU has standards we have measures to make data centers climate neutral we are producing at the moment kind of a code of conduct and indicators for telecoms and we need targets for e-ways and one way to do it is we need to turn the business model of the telecom and let's say the ICT industry to be everything as a service instead of incentivizing people to buy tons of materials new models, new equipment new laptops, tablets to turns into a service provision same thing when you buy as organization ICT it should be service organization not hardware buying and that we need green public procurement so the legislative measures should be from benevolent to obligatory that means with ITU and other organizations we have to make sure that we describe very clear public procurement criteria so anything with digital is through a green public procurement and at the end what you don't measure you don't manage we need very clear measurements when ICT is producing positive effects and for that you see the link that I just put in we work and we have so called green digital coalition that takes the ITU latest recommendation L1480 to apply and to validate and to create guidelines for everybody to use down to the smallest SME thank you thank you very much another question to Mr. Andrew Acosta we understand that space data is important in planning and managing green and blue infrastructure and identifying climate mitigation adaptation measures can you please in two minutes tell us a bit more how about space agencies can partner with other organizations to ensure that these advantages are effectively used to promote greener connectivity and facilitate the implementation of climate change adaptation and mitigation measures thank you sure one of the key aspects in space is that we the agencies need to cooperate nowadays it's very difficult for a nation for one agency to have single space programs to tackle only their issues so cooperation is one of the key aspects of space also when we started the Portuguese Space Agency we started just in 2019 and one of the key elements that we want to achieve is to connect the space with the non-space sectors because we the space geeks we know what our data is capable of we know what our satellites are doing but we need to connect with those economic sectors that are not using today the space data and this is one of the things that we wanted to force and although it's not related to this in the first point for example the Ministry of Justice in Portugal had an issue for a land register it was not possible to know which land belongs to whom so through a platform and earth observation data it was possible it's now possible to have in one single spot one single platform all of this information now if we grow this platform and we bring other sources of data forward to this platform then we can have the Ministry of Environment for example knowing exactly which type of forests or trees that exist so they can monitor biodiversity if we bring then also data regarding the rivers and aquapons that exist we can prevent floods or we can mitigate these issues and most of this data is now available again through Copernicus 3 and open data and for example European Space Agency now with Austria has developed a platform to monitor for example which places of the city or of the country are better to use solar panels which areas are better to use wind farms so all of these energy infrastructures are now looking to space data and how can benefit through this but one point just to finalize it's very important that space infrastructure is also threatened because of the quantity of satellites and debris that we have and now at UNOSA in Vienna we are preparing together Portugal and the United Nations Office of Outer Space Affairs that is going to be the input for the summit of the future next year because this is another sustainability that we need to have in space and we are Portugal and UNOSA are now working very hard on it. Thank you very much. Thank you and excellent examples on both sides my last question is to Mr. Modigliani this is how can government agencies and research institutes like the one that you represent to support national meteorological and hydrological services and mitigating environmental risks with digital technologies and what are some of the key factors that have been successful in this regard? The ECMWF it has been and continued to be a valuable resource for the national meteorological services in leveraging ICT based solutions and emergency technologies to mitigate environmental risk and challenges. One of the purpose of ECMWF is to supply data and forecast of medium to long-term weather and other environmental conditions and this can be used to inform a decision making related to environmental risk management. In addition to that ECMWF also supplies access to the latest technologies and data that can help meteorological and hydrological services develop on their own or accurate forecast of extreme weather events and improve the decision making related to environmental risk management. Recently for example ECMWF has started to provide what is called a European weather cloud cloud-based sort of services that NMHS can use to do this type of work. Additionally ECMWF facilitates collaboration between private sector, public sector and research organization to help national meteorological services better understand the implications of these technologies and develop strategies to mitigate environmental risk. Generally by working together with ECMWF NMHS can use ICT based solution and emergency technologies for a more resilient environment that is better prepared to deal with the impacts even during conflicts and it enables NMHS to prepare for the future and adapt to changing climate. What I think is important is really the fact that the collaborative sort of aspect between ECMWF and the national meteorological services and in general between national meteorological services and other organizations that I think is quite important to achieve all these goals. Thank you. Thank you very much. We've heard a lot of great examples of how digital is supporting environmental transition but also about the policies that are important and the steps that we need to make to ensure that the digital transformation is green. We now like to deep dive into a concrete initiative that has proven successful in the domain and that could serve as a valuable example to be possibly replicated and I'm happy to welcome now online with us Andriy Hnapp who is the CEO and data analyst at Waste Ukraine Analytics. WA is a platform to accelerate the transition to a circular economy a B2B marketplace for companies in the field of waste management based on open data as well as an aggregator of historical data on waste and a tool for creating mandatory data sets for local communities. Andriy is also a smart city digital infrastructure expert within the context of a project carried out by the EBRD European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and Andriy you will be sharing insights from a pilot project on industrial waste mapping conducted as part of the EU for environment program and supported by UNIDO and with this you will show us the critical role that waste management data plays in achieving positive results Thank you Thank you colleagues and all the speakers and panelists it was very interesting to hear all of that and really I want to share my thoughts, comments about the project on circular economy and new growth opportunity which was conducted by EU for environment and was discussed with our colleagues back in September last year on special circular economy regional assembly which we discussed results of this industrial waste mapping and I was not part of this project as implementation I just see evidence the result about lack of data inconsistency of data readiness that data are incomplete and specifically for Ukraine because one of the communities which were the pilot digital infrastructure for gathering information on waste and at the same time I work as civil society activist as part of my solidarity fellowship of 2022 on the project open data on waste when we communicate with authorities ministries about open data about waste and the quality and how to increase that and how this bottleneck to accelerate transition to stock economy and all these efforts all these signs end up in our joint project with ministry of digital transformation about creating 50 15 plus mandatory data sets on circular economy and low carbon economy and analyze the numbers of ETC standards that can be used in Ukrainian transition so together with my teammates we are now analyzing like legal part environmental part and of course open data and this is like ongoing project but we already seen what things stopping us to achieve results and couple of them already mentioned by my colleagues on this panel but one of them I want to highlight is this level of analytical culture in authorities because this is a common thing that authorities on different level gathering information as reports and disclosure and things like that but they are not use it on proper analytical tools to predict forecast and uses to this circle and low carbon transition that we are looking for and part of this problem is that some nature of this transition because it's very often that we see this path on linear economy as like complicated problem but in nature it is complex and I like very much comment from my colleague from Stanford who said that the opposite part for complicated is simple so we can assemble decompose the problem and even the hardest mechanism laptop wherever and engineer can combine but circle economy is complex that opposite part is independent so when we could take part of that like economy or other aspect it is very difficult to see result of the whole system and with our project we see how it is struggle our authorities with minister of digital transformation minister of environment, minister of economic together like join view to this transition and how hard it is on many many levels to come up with which responsible for what part of this transition and we trying to put it all together with other initiative on open data and informational system and time I was really glad to hear from our colleague allies today mention that this is core essence of all this process and we currently in this path with our project on open data and communicating with authority and of course with civil society activists because open data is more like disclosure and material for action data driven action both for authorities and for civil society and for some challenge as we all having this very important to have like proper data and informational standards and systems so thank you very much I know that we are like a little off schedule so this is all for my part and I will answer some question on the panel later on. Thank you very much and yeah really glad that you also again highlighted the importance of information data open data monitoring for you know data driven policy making and again for us to be able to in the end have to maximize the net effect of the green digital transformation as Ilias also mentioned I don't think that we have time for questions but we do have time to thank all the excellent speakers the experts I would like to thank you for your really good interventions and contributions if there are questions I think people can put them in the chat and we will get we will direct them to the right people and and get back to you and as you said we're running out of time and so I would like to now hand over to my colleague Natalia Moschow who's the director of CIS the regional director of CIS who's come and to be here with us today for the next session thank you thank you very much Vanessa and before you for the co-moderation and for making all the efforts to be on time and I would like to thank all the participants here in the room and online for being patient engaging and sharing all your experience so the third blog that we are now moving on will be dedicated mostly to partnerships you've all along your deliberations have mentioned that partnerships are a key between the government agencies be it with the with the private partners be it between the international organizations NGOs and so on so forth and I'm thankful for all the examples that we already shared so based on this experience we I'm sure will have a fruitful discussion and more experiences coming from the speakers of this third part of our round table but recognizing the hard work that our interpreters are doing I would like to pass to Russian language a bit in this session and I know that most of our speakers would be speaking in English nevertheless let me then be the one including you and language from the CIS region into our discourse dear colleagues dear participants of the round table let me thank you all and go to our third part of the round table which is dedicated to innovative partnerships aimed at creating inclusive and stable digital development and as I already noted there were two examples presented in the previous two parts of our round table the previous speakers and based on already presented examples I would like to note that we see that strong global partner relations and cooperation on the global, on the regional on the country level are such a set of successful goals and inclusive digital inclusive digital development all of these were noted for the stimulation of digital development many countries of course need international technical help we also heard the examples of this earlier but despite the high demand the volume of funding the development continues to decrease and in this regard we need the development and support of new innovative partnerships be it private partnerships be it attracting private partners to independent activities partnerships with public organizations and government sectors and of course partnerships between international organizations taking into account the experience we heard earlier in the previous sessions our session will allow to hear a new experience and to communicate it and come to the more consolidated conclusions I would like to introduce our participants our speakers in the session is today with us here in the hall the leading specialist in the project of the innovation and digital development of Azerbaijan also with us online must be Mr. Autandil Koshradze representative of the Georgian innovation and technology online colleagues who online I ask you turn on your camera and be present with us further will be Maya Tomanovich director of the Slovenian enterprise fund which should also be with us online General Director of the Norwegian Meteorological Institute also online and Syat Bogatirov representative of the department of innovation and industrial policy of the city of Moscow but colleagues before I would like to invite my colleague Sarah to present a small presentation about the alliance about innovation and entrepreneurship which announced today which you said today our director of the development of electricity Mr. Zava Zava alliance which was launched in January of this year and we would like to present Sarah Thank you very much Natalia so indeed as you mentioned Dr. Zava Zava in his introductory remarks presented pointed at the innovation and entrepreneurship alliance for digital development so I would like to give you a little bit more information with it and so in fact this alliance has been established in direct response to sorry I'm just seeing there is a challenge with the sharing of the screen so I just want to make sure that you can see it correctly I think like this should be fine and so the alliance in fact has been established in direct response to the request of the members of member states of the ITU to receive more support on building an innovation ecosystem and what we see right now is that many countries aspire to become an innovation driven digital economies but we can identify that in fact despite the massive investment in ICTs entrepreneurship and innovations there are still many countries that are struggling to adapt to the fast-changing digital environment to become an effective adopter of emerging digital technologies to become a driver of digital innovation that creates social economic impact to leverage entrepreneurship driven digital innovation as a driver for job creation to gain access to a network of like-made and change maker and their best practices and also finally the challenge to their challenge to develop innovative local regional or global partnership to accelerate digital development and so what we are aiming to do with this alliance is to support countries to be ahead of the curve and make sense of the evolution of technology policy and innovation dynamics we the innovation also aim to harness technological know-how into global goose through unopened innovation and multi stakeholder mechanism accelerating access to emerging technology for all it also aim to accelerate the uptake of digital innovation driven entrepreneurship and opportunities for talent to achieve social economic inclusion in their communities the alliance also seeks to develop agile policies that provide stakeholders with safe space for experimentation and curaging innovation and attracting investment in the digital ecosystem and finally it also aim to promote collaboration synergies that scale digital innovation and achieve cross cutting sectoral value for competitive digital economy but so how do we aim to do that concretely through the innovation alliance so this would be done through three main vehicles the first one being through a digital transformation lab that will support the design and implementation of the network of centers and this lab will provide technical assistance to enable countries currently lacking key capabilities in sandboxing and developing initiatives to accelerate digital development and so this lab will be located in Geneva and will be accessible virtually the second vehicle will be the network of acceleration centers as I mentioned just previously and so in fact the network will enhance global regional and national innovation capabilities for technology, policy and flagship initiative development the various centers will accelerate digital transformation through a unique ecosystem thinking approach which combines the best of three recognized methodologies which are sense making system thinking and design thinking and the centers will also amplify local capabilities to accelerate local innovation entrepreneurship and the digitalization of economies to improve to improve sorry the competitiveness of the economy and finally the digital innovation board so this board will guide the work of the alliance and ensure its effectiveness accountability and some decision making and so the board will facilitate high level coordination and engage in global advocacy at the UN level and with regional and international organizations as well and so with this it will help to leverage its reach and it will help mobilize resources and partnerships share lessons learned and create global learning community and so I really invite you to learn more about this innovation alliance by following that I will also put in the chat and thank you very much for your attention thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you very much Thank you everybody Thank you Sarah for presentation of alliance I would like to answer two questions one is how do you think how do you think how do you think how do you think how do you think how do you think how do you think how do you think how do you think how do you think how do you think when you talk about a so we will start at I would like to answer the questions in that way that alliance in a way alliance can provides a platform of collaboration between companies, university researchers, institutions during Dawn great. We're trying to do great but at the same time we have a specific lack of the research and the development centers. For us it's a crucial R&D, for us it's a crucial. Another significant role by providing a platform for the ecosystem is to connect with the big companies and to create R&D centers by the big companies. What we know from our own experience as Azerbaijan in 1991 when we become independent we are petroleum and gas country. We used to work in the old Soviet technologies but when this transformation started when BP came to Azerbaijan, when the Satol came to Azerbaijan, when Chevron came to Azerbaijan, when Total came to Azerbaijan, they came to Azerbaijan and they started the corporative change process in Azerbaijan. That's now we can see the Socar have the basis in Switzerland even. It's our now it's an oil and gas company. It means that the influence from abroad, experience from abroad and the experience and the boost from the big companies, big investors can create a good ecosystem and the good research and development centers to enlarge and ensure our ecosystem. We have a very small market. Azerbaijan is a compact country. We don't like to say this small country but we are a compact country. We don't have such a big market. But we have good opportunities to go abroad from our country. For example, the geography is a destiny. We are between Russia, Iran. We are between Europe and China and India between Asia and Europe. So it means that we are in the middle of the Euro Asia and this kind of the increasing of awareness of our country and what we do and good and strong cooperation and collaboration with Alliance can increase the awareness and also can really boost our innovation ecosystem. Yes, it was a little bit long as an answer to your question. Yes, we are waiting from Alliance come to visit our country. We are waiting to increase the awareness and to help us to build our many research and development centers. And I know if I make a mistake about the network of acceleration centers, you have new acceleration center in New Delhi. We would like to have in Azerbaijan also the new acceleration center and become part of this network. We have another big, we have the six year strategy for future as a development agency and now we are really impacting to the legislation process in Azerbaijan. We have zero tax policy for ICT companies, zero VAT, zero social security and easy simple resident permit for the ICT companies who wants to transfer to Azerbaijan. We have too many from Russia because of the situation, the reluctance we have from Turkey. Now we are working with Israel. The Israel University opened in Azerbaijan yesterday, big cybersecurity center is our in the center for in Azerbaijan. So as you see and we work on it very dense and we want to have more and more awareness about what we do and really and this also will help to make a bridge between Asia and Europe. It will also help a bridge to regional regional development. As you see that we are also the between Europe as Georgia and we are also the bridge to the Central Asia. And if Europe and also we about the green technology, we have the big investment and our main investors right now is BP who totally changed their policy and they making a green tech and green energy and we will be one of the green energy suppliers to Europe in the upcoming years. So what we need, we need more cadres, we need more human capital, we need more acceleration centers, we need more research and development centers. Resources we have we can find more but what we need we need is capacity building. Thank you very much. Thank you very much Orhan for the inspiring and energetic response and I would like to just remind us to keep short with we're still a bit lacking behind and you've mentioned your neighbor country Georgia and I would like to raise my next question to representative from Georgia. We had guests today, keynote speakers who noted the importance of attracting girls and women in the industry. What do you think, what do you see from your experience, how can you attract more women in the sphere of technology through these mechanisms of partnership, the state of partnership? Hello everyone. First of all, thank you very much for inviting me for this amazing conference and I would like to say hello to all other panelists and all the members of the audience. From our side, I would like to say that the government of Georgia decided to support the knowledge and innovation driven economy in the country. We were established by the government of Georgia under Ministry of Economy and Sustainable Development in 2014 where there was like a lot of the challenges when we are we wanted to establish the more to build innovation community in the country. But right now, I would like to more focus on about the involvement more girls and the female involvement in the innovative businesses. We have a lot of programs in all around the earth. We are massively investing in Georgia startups. We are also investing into bringing international accelerator programs. We are also supporting creation of the private VC funds because it is very important that when you are talking about the VC fund, it must be private fund. And also when we are talking about the creation of the ecosystem, definitely, of course, that we would like to have as much as it is possible to have a gender balance in our programs. Right now, we did not have any programs that were supporting specifically more involvement of the women. Only things that we started few years ago, it was when we created the boot camps and in boot camps, it was a 50-50 participation, but not in the most important programs. But we worked very much with the UN women in Georgia where we created our action plan. And right now, the action plan, including in all our programs, including in the ICT training, that we have a separate additional scores for the female participants in order to be accepted in our IT trainings program. Also, in all our like the boot camps or hackathons and et cetera, we have the gender balance. We are trying to have a 50-50% in all our programs. And most importantly, even in the access to finance program, from last month, actually, we added additional two score points for the businesses who, more than 50% of the shares are owned by the females in Georgia. So in our granting programs also, like the female startups, we'll have more and a better chance in order to receive granting financing for us. And this is just beginning. And when we are talking about the cooperation of the business sector and academia, this is the, without that, it is not possible actually to really create the ecosystem when we will have more female participants in the innovation ecosystem. And when we're talking about the digitalization and technology ecosystem, this is the real industry that there is no excuse not to be the gender balance and not to be the gender equality there. This is the industry where there is a full of opportunities and there is all doors are open for all participants in all around the world. So it's not only the programs how we are run, it's not only the quotations that we are giving to the females or extra points and et cetera. But what we are trying all together to really build is to build the community and ecosystem where people does not think that with the stereotypes that this is something that men's job, this is something female job and et cetera, because this is the most important. Otherwise, all the programs, all the extra points, you know, it may give you like the small wins. But overall, you need more and more efforts together, together with academia and private sector. Otherwise, it will not work. So we are also trying to work with big private sector with small private sector representatives in order to work as much as it's possible to create the ecosystem where gender equality is present. Thank you so much. And this takes us to our next speaker, Maya Tomanić Vidović from the Slovenian Enterprise Fund. Maya, could you kindly share with us on the work of your fund to stimulate more innovation and help support, build innovative systems for small and medium enterprises? Maya, please, would be delighted to hear your experience. Thank you. Thank you very much and welcome from the Slovenian Enterprise Fund, from the ministry on behalf of the ministry, our responsible ministry for the economy, tourism and sport, and of course of the all Slovenian innovation ecosystem. So if we want to think how to support future development of really very high tech innovative companies, not only startups, also scalabs that later SMEs, we really have to be focused on challenges of our time. We live in an era of completely global instability, resources are becoming restrictive, problems with supply chains are growing, we are facing with bigger, bigger climate changes, risks are higher than ever before, costs are increasing and so on. And especially our startups, our scalabs are facing with the lack of skills, not only the lack of resources, financial and skills resources, therefore their contribution for sustainable development solutions, which could help some of these global challenges are still too small. And of course we would like to increase their contribution, especially if we talk about green and digital transformation. So what we have to do, we have to be even more agile, creative and shift. We must be focusing more on priority topics and greater development input, including of course digital technologies, and what is very important future will demand even more innovative and collaborative solutions. Individual solutions are over. So we need collaborative solutions and it has been bluntly shown how essential innovations and disruptive technologies based on science, deep tech and collaboration among different partners, not only on national level, but also on the international level together with entrepreneurial spirit really are. So it is also inevitable that this kind of companies, so research, innovation and new deep tech ventures will have an important part for the global economic recovery or the global stability which we would like to reach. So therefore the focus support of public institutions like Slovene Enterprise Fund needs to be of course to foster the innovation in tech ecosystem among SMEs and especially among high tech companies. Of course first to provide assets to finance to all stages of business development from startup to later stages with a different kind of solutions. And we offer them different kinds, depth, venture capital, financial lines, also grants together with the ministry. We develop some kind of grant grant lines dedicated to the green transformation dedicated to the digital transformation and mainly this money is coming from European programs and companies are prepared to invest in this kind of investments connected with the green or digital transformation. But at the end they still have problems with the skills. They need some additional support with the skills. So financial resources are not enough. It's not enough. So therefore we created some support through voucher system. We have 15 different groups of vouchers. With vouchers we can find different kinds of services from other partners in the ecosystem and with these services companies can increase their competitiveness, their ability about green or digital orientation. Also startups and high tech companies they have special program designed for their competitiveness and for their competencies with mentoring, coaching, support with startup clinic, scale up investment workshops and so on and so on. So a lot of things are going on but at the end there are still not enough sustainable development oriented projects. So therefore we started to create or started to support the creation or specific very specific sustainable development partnership where we would like to connect or we started already with this and in some cases we already did it connect to really research institutions, doctors, professors, researchers from specific fields together with companies and also financial investors could be connected with this specific partnership and other support institutions. So this is very important really to create the strong partnership with among all these partners to connect them to find the right persons on the right places to connect them and then they start to cooperate. But of course if we talk about global problems then we need also the global projects for this program. So this kind of partnership should not stay on the national level, they could be transferred on the multinational level. Therefore we try maybe together with some working groups of European Commission or some entities at the European Commission or also to our very good partner UNIDO we try to create this kind of partnership for specific fields also on the multinational level. Right now we have a partnership for biotech industry very specific on biotech medicine and vaccines. Then we have a special partnership for hydrogen industry for smart factoring digitalization in all factoring sector and this could be maybe additional step. Yes this is our main focus. Thank you very much Maya and I understand that there is so much you have to share and you want to share to others but then unfortunately we can't go into very deep detail but indeed I know about your engagement with UNIDO and that's an excellent example of a partnership with an international organization. With this let me move on and I would like to address my next question to our online participant through our Skolin from Norwegian Institute, Meteorological Institute if I'm not mistaking hopefully not. You I would like to ask your views on strengthening the partner real partnership relations between the state, the academia, the and the private sector to support the sustainable development or what would be your perspective on this in this regard. Thank you chair and thanks for inviting me and you are indeed correct. I am the director general of the Norwegian Meteorological Institute but today I will address you mainly in my capacity as acting president of the European region of WMO. So the revitalization of public private and also academic partnerships to develop research and services for a sustainable resilient and inclusive infrastructure is essential for the achievement of the SDGs and weather, climate, water and other environmental services are essential for the development of such an infrastructure and also the data and information provided by these partnerships are essential in helping governments, businesses and citizens to to make informed decisions. Decisions that can help to promote economic development, reduce poverty and share access to food and water and promote sustainable and equitable development. In addition the use of early warning systems which has already been mentioned by a few here today can help to mitigate the impacts of extreme weather events and other environmental threats and thereby helping to ensure that societies can continue to develop and prosper in a sustainable and equitable manner. So by supporting public private and academic partnerships in the development of research services for sustainable resilient and inclusive infrastructures WMO is helping to ensure that the SDGs are achieved and I will now present to you three WMO initiatives and I will try to illustrate how partnerships can benefit from these initiatives and also how they can help realizing the initiatives. The 2021 Extraordinary World Meteorological Congress approved what we know called the WMO Unified Data Policy. That was done in order to dramatically strengthen the world's weather and climate services to a systematic increase in observational data and data products from across the globe. The WMO Unified Data Policy states that members shall provide on a free and unrestricted basis the core data that are necessary for the provision of services in support of the protection of life and property and for the well-being of all nations. This data policy will strengthen and better sustain monitoring and prediction of all earth system components and that again could have massive socio-economic benefits. It will lead to additional exchange of all types of environmental data which in turn will enable all WMO members to deliver better, more accurate and timely weather and climate-related services. Free and unrestricted access to this data will also foster collaboration with the private sector and with academia and I think that further benefits will be obtained if the private sector and academia also share their environmental data with the public sector so that it can be used to improve the services within weather and climate. So that was the first example. Free and unrestricted access to data. Second one is about the earth system approach to the development of research and services. This approach recognized the interconnectivity of the various components of the earth system and seeks to promote the integration of data and information from different sources to better understand the impact of climate change and other environmental threats. Close collaboration between the national meteorological and hydrological services and academia is a prerequisite for realizing the benefit of earth system approach. We need enormous amounts of research that we cannot do on ourselves. We have to do it together with academia. My final example has been mentioned a few times already. Early warning systems are a proven and effective and feasible climate adaptation measure that saves lives and provides at least a tenfold return on investment. And as you have heard the United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres in March 2022 announced that the United Nations would spearhead a new action to ensure that every person on earth is protecting by early warning systems within five years. And he tasked the WMO to lead this effort. Ensuring that every person on earth is protected by early warnings within a period of five years is a global challenge that will require the combined efforts of the public and private sectors and will not be possible without the vast and varied capacity of businesses. So WMO recognized that the role of the private sector could go beyond a supporting role and that private technology sector could be a leading contributor to the five-year goal through private public partnerships. So overall WMO is committed to supporting government businesses and citizens in the effort to create sustainable resilient and inclusive infrastructure. And through the earth system approach the unified data policy and early warning system initiative WMO is committed to providing the necessary data and information to ensure that public private and academic partnerships can develop research and services which again will respond to the challenges of climate change, extreme weather events and other environmental threats. Thank you very much. Thank you Ro. We've heard today about the early warning system earlier and indeed thank you for again reiterating the importance. And this made me thought that you know we had the presentation today from Kyrgyzstan about connecting rural remote areas of how important the early warning system would be for those areas that are you know remote not always well connected but also the system might be as important for the large cities right and indeed as you're saying the partnership is indispensable to making such global programs or projects a success. And in this sense I would like to turn my question to a city representative you know we've heard about the different government nations international organizations rural areas but I think the cities face a challenge of their own as well. And my question would go to our next to our next speaker Asiyat Bagaterova. Asiyat we'd love to hear your perspective on the role of partnerships in the innovative and entrepreneurial development of large cities such as Moscow that you're representing please. Hello thank you so much and tell you for your question. Thank you so much for previous speakers but my presentation will be a bit different according that I present the department of investment and industrial policy I will it's so pleasure for me to present how Moscow achieves SDGs in 9 and 17 it's connected with some industrial experience and experience in cooperation. First of all I would like to mention that Moscow's government pays much attention for SDGs achievement and not everyone knows that from 2018 to 2021 Moscow participated and successfully finished the pilot project the territorial approach to SDGs and launched the report and following OECD recommendations Moscow carries out projects that could be best practices for all cities and regions in achieving SDGs 7 9 and 17. First of all I would like to tell about the project that is named workplace creation. What does it mean when invested during his real estate project implementation also creates the place of employment as business centers or industrial parks or shopping or sports social or education facilities and he received he receives a benefit for rent or a benefit for payments for changing a type of permitted use for land plot and this project will be useful for cities that have problem with the commuting. Another project that's also connected with the investment and industrial policy is offset agreements it's public procurement with obligations we use this instrument to cover social important directions as children meal in kindergarten or medicine provision or something similar so in order to have proved and guaranteed supplies Moscow concludes a long term contract in this case the investors should build on the city's territory manufacturing plant and after launching the investor will have learned term guaranteed sealed with production that is so important for establishing business processes and coming for SDGs 17 I would like to say that in this regard Moscow is open for learning. Moscow is open for sharing the best practices that will help people to live better in their cities and regions and in order to share our experience on our Russian national level in 2020 we launched the project with a Russian single on a single investor towns. It was very exciting for us to help them to achieve SDGs by learning with them or a system strategy creating recommendation for them how to develop toolkit effective toolkit of improving their urban management and development and I'm glad to say that it's helped them to improve the quality of life to improve their economic development and not long ago in order to to board our partnership together with the curation commission we are developing ESG rating of cities and regions of the curation economic union our aim here is not to find who is better or worse but to identify the problem area with SDGs in this region to search for new growth points in cities and to of course to have best practices exchange in sustainable development we believe that the result of ESG rating will accelerate and force implementation of the national development strategies of the curation economic union members in conclusion I would like to say that Moscow carries more than 95 projects across all the SDGs and we have so much to share with you and today much has been said about the digitalization about how different regions solve this problem and try to be the better but according to the UN report a government survey Moscow with a city that reached the first place among the all cities of the world in this rating and it emphasizes tremendous work that have been done in digitalization of public services and integration of artificial intelligence where I'm telling you about it we are open for cooperation in different ways especially if it's connected with integration SDGs in some solutions in industrial and investment skills we believe that some mentioned practices will be useful for you and help to improve policies in our in your regions and as a result the people will live in a more comfortable area and be and be even a little more happier thank you so much thank you for sharing your experience as well and with this I understand we have and all of you would have much more to share but I invite you to you know speak when we when we're finished with the with the event because we are short of time over time and I see that the interpreters are still working and I would kindly ask if you have another you know three five minutes for us to conclude to conclude our round table overall so I would like to warmly thank the speakers of this session of our round table and with these these accept my apologies for cutting you short or not letting you speak as much as you would love to now dear participants let me now proceed to finalize our round table and I would not like to go and you know in detail remind us what we've discussed today I think we have received and then reached ourselves with experience that all of you have shared the participants here in the room and the online thank you so much everyone for connecting and and staying with us until this this hour we've looked today into the importance and I think we've most of all stressed the importance of various partnerships of openness of into sharing the experience learning from each other's experiences into achieving the SDGs as a whole but also the SDG 9 that relates to the industry innovation and and infrastructure that we the UN agencies present here are working towards the achievement and SDG 17 which is dedicated to the partnerships as a whole and we see from the multiple examples you've shared that through various partnerships we can achieve much more in the work that we are all doing in our own organizations in the villages in the cities in the countries in the regions and at the international level as a whole and I thank you warmly for sharing and being open to share your experience I would like of course to thank our host for having us here for offering us a great venue and Cornelia please pass our warm welcome to to your management for for offering this this room and of course I would like to extend our thanks to the technical moderation to Sarah for putting this all together for our interpreters because you are bringing in a better a better and more inclusive experience of our meetings I don't know I hope I didn't forget anyone in thanking but truly warm thanks to all of our speakers our keynote our host our commentators organizers and everyone who is present in the room online and watching us via webcast in the whole big world out there that we're trying to make better thank you so much and wishing you a lovely evening and great success in all your endeavors thank you so much thank you